Which benchmark programs do you suggest?

PC Mag 27 Oct 1992 did a preliminary VL bus early designs benchmark, ISA Mach32 still beat everything (other than itself in VLB version) in windows tests
https://books.google.pl/books?id=IuaYd-eFaFoC … epage&q&f=false

Never tested ATI cards, cannot comment on them.
For the rest it goes roughly like this (considering Win3.1 environment which is the right fit for ISA VGAs):
Fastest are CirrusLogic. They support 16-bit colors at 800x600. Obviously later versions are faster than the early ones.
Then is S3 928. It is limited to 8-bit colors at 800x600 - kind of meh. Raw performance at this color depth is actually better than CL and ET at 16-bit, but to me 8-bit only is disqualification by itself.
Then is ET4000W32, it supports 16-bit colors at 800x600, but is almost 2x slower than the CirrusLogic 5426 and later versions.
Somewhere there is the WD one. It is pretty good in DOS.

I think i can provide benched numbers, but that's the order in general.

@rasz_pl
They missed some of the most popular VGA's at the time in their test. Kind of strange.

pshipkov wrote:

@rasz_pl
They missed some of the most popular VGA's at the time in their test. Kind of strange.

they tested all available initial VESA implementations and compared to best ISA card on the market, seems pretty solid to me

retardware wrote:

Which benchmark programs do you suggest?

i have no idea so i'll leave that question to you all, i really don't know much about benchmarks in those years. the oldest video benchmark i know about is final reality.

It is also important to specify the mode as some chipsets have acceleration functions only available in certain modes/bit depths or speed differs greatly.

noshutdown wrote:

retardware wrote:

Which benchmark programs do you suggest?

i have no idea so i'll leave that question to you all, i really don't know much about benchmarks in those years. the oldest video benchmark i know about is final reality.

Last time i did benchmark graphic cards under Windows 3.11, I used WinTune, WindSock 3.30 and Speedy, which was to test a pcmcia card relative to the integrated chip in an old laptop.

I remember WinTach, emulated tasks like word processing and graphics.
Dumb unaccelerated cards, performance was worse if the cursor was over the active area, eliminated in those which had a hardware cursor.

I use only Wintach 1.0 and Winbench 3.11. I do tests on Windows 95 as it already has all the neccessary drivers for these old cards. Besides Windows 3.11 doesn't like if you load too many drivers in it's INF file and new drivers won't show in the setup. You have to delete the INF files but then you lose previous installs.

pshipkov wrote:

Never tested ATI cards, cannot comment on them. For the rest it goes roughly like this (considering Win3.1 environment which is […]
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Never tested ATI cards, cannot comment on them.
For the rest it goes roughly like this (considering Win3.1 environment which is the right fit for ISA VGAs):
Fastest are CirrusLogic. They support 16-bit colors at 800x600. Obviously later versions are faster than the early ones.
Then is S3 928. It is limited to 8-bit colors at 800x600 - kind of meh. Raw performance at this color depth is actually better than CL and ET at 16-bit, but to me 8-bit only is disqualification by itself.
Then is ET4000W32, it supports 16-bit colors at 800x600, but is almost 2x slower than the CirrusLogic 5426 and later versions.
Somewhere there is the WD one. It is pretty good in DOS.

I think i can provide benched numbers, but that's the order in general.

S3 928 supports 24-bit colour. I've had several of them. You are probably thinking of the 911 or the 924. It's possible some 928 cards only have the 8-bit RAMDAC, but they must be uncommon.
ET4000W32 is said significantly slower at GUI acceleration than the 32i. Those cards should be pretty competitive with the cirrus.
Are CL really the fastest ISA cards for accelerated graphics? I think the 5434 is pretty decent, don't know about the others but I am skeptical.

if I had to guess, I would think Mach64 should beats the pants off of all of those cards.

I have an ATI Mach64 ISA card.. I'll set it up over the next few weeks and try to get some benchmarks. I also have an ATI Graphics Ultra ISA (Mach 8 ) I can benchmark.

I can confirm that the Mach8 is pretty quick for 256 colour Windows acceleration (For an ISA card).

The partial graphics performance tests we do around here often skew reality, but what i am seeing in my own tests shows that ISA CL in Win3.1x are faster than S3 928, ET4000w32 and Tridents.
S3 928 is actually faster than CL, but cannot get it to run in 16-bit colors.
Do you have this particular model video card that runs in 16bit ? Wonder if you can find a picture of it onlije, or maybe snap one of yours ?
For reference - I have this one here:

what? do you guys mean that s3 928 would only accelerate 8bit mode? this is ridiculous.

I did some benchmarks a few years ago:

Still have a plan to redo all the tests with more cards but no time so far...

In short:

Best ISA card for DOS = CL-5434
Best ISA card for Windows = ATI Mach64 VRAM

@noshutdown
I think the S3 drivers are limited to 8-bit color on Windows 3.1, but can handle higher color depths in Win95 or later. At least that's what i see here, but i can be wrong. Will be great if somebody else can confirm.

@kixs
Thanks for the info. Really good stuff.

Funny. Just discovered this thread. I‘m exact on the same quest looking for a comprehensive ISA gdi performance comparison. 😀
Kixs‘s Screenshot is already a great first step.
Especially how do the better S3 chips as 928 perform (vs ati vs N9 vs Gd5434). 😀