ET4000 is a fairly fast chip as far as ISA cards go; the limiting factor here would be the ISA slot of course. By going with a VLB card you could get significantly better performance. As for 25fps in Doom, that really depends on what 486 CPU you are using. Something like a DX4 would do much better than that.

ET4000AX is just a little bit faster than the better Cirrus Logic or Trident chips - maybe a bit faster. Nothing fancy. One reason why it maybe sought after is that it can be used (for some reason, which is not really an interest to me) in Atari ST machines...

If you want top speed from ISA card you would have to look for ET4000/W32i or ATI Mach 64 card...

i have two 486 system, both with integrated video card (tgui 9440 and ET40000AX) and only ISA slot. Upgrading video card is not possible in both system. i prefer the system with the ET4000 because is really nice but if is really tooo slow i’m ready to use only the one with the trident. Considering that i only use dos games and i think maximum Doom/Doom2, it’s really a bottleneck this ET4000AX?

AlessandroB wrote:

i have two 486 system, both with integrated video card (tgui 9440 and ET40000AX) and only ISA slot. Upgrading video card is not possible in both system. i prefer the system with the ET4000 because is really nice but if is really tooo slow i’m ready to use only the one with the trident. Considering that i only use dos games and i think maximum Doom/Doom2, it’s really a bottleneck this ET4000AX?

I've run Quake in 320x200 on some 486 and Pentium machines with Trident 9000 card - compared to S3 Trio 64V+ (PCI card) it was slower, but it was still definitely playable, so I would tell - it won't matter in Doom or Doom 2.

AlessandroB wrote:

i have two 486 system, both with integrated video card (tgui 9440 and ET40000AX) and only ISA slot. Upgrading video card is not possible in both system. i prefer the system with the ET4000 because is really nice but if is really tooo slow i’m ready to use only the one with the trident. Considering that i only use dos games and i think maximum Doom/Doom2, it’s really a bottleneck this ET4000AX?

I've run Doom on a U5S-33 without cache on just a TVGA9000B and it was nearly playable so yeah, ET4000AX will let you play Doom fine on a 486 provided you don't go with a slow 25/33 MHz part - that would be rough.

no i will install DX4 100 or 5x86 P75 or POD 83Mhz. i not want that the 4000 was tooo slow for this four CPU. if the difference is 5fps on 35fps can be ok, not really more

appiah4 wrote:

AlessandroB wrote:

i have two 486 system, both with integrated video card (tgui 9440 and ET40000AX) and only ISA slot. Upgrading video card is not possible in both system. i prefer the system with the ET4000 because is really nice but if is really tooo slow i’m ready to use only the one with the trident. Considering that i only use dos games and i think maximum Doom/Doom2, it’s really a bottleneck this ET4000AX?

I've run Doom on a U5S-33 without cache on just a TVGA9000B and it was nearly playable so yeah, ET4000AX will let you play Doom fine on a 486 provided you don't go with a slow 25/33 MHz part - that would be rough.

u5s... interesting CPU, i'm check if i had one....

On any fast 486 (such DX4, 5x86), replacing an ET4000AX with another ISA video card is not going to get you massive performance gains, since you're being constrained by the ISA bus speed, not by the performance of the VGA chip. In fact, ET4000AX is quite good for ISA.

Obviously, even the crappiest VLB or PCI cards will work better than the best ISA VGA (with some exceptions). But if you only have ISA slots then I wouldn't bother replacing the ET4000AX.

TheMobRules wrote:

Obviously, even the crappiest VLB or PCI cards will work better than the best ISA VGA (with some exceptions). But if you only have ISA slots then I wouldn't bother replacing the ET4000AX.

This is the point, in fact i can't change the vga in both system, but one have a fast TGIU9440-1 and the other a slow ET4000AX, the real question is: how slow is the 4000 respect a Trident considering the maxim target will be Doom1/2????

I strong prefer the one with the 4000 because other reason apart the vga.

AlessandroB wrote:

This is the point, in fact i can't change the vga in both system, but one have a fast TGIU9440-1 and the other a slow ET4000AX, the real question is: how slow is the 4000 respect a Trident considering the maxim target will be Doom1/2????

I strong prefer the one with the 4000 because other reason apart the vga.

I assume the TGUI9440 is probably VLB, in that case it should be considerably faster than the Tseng, especially with a fast 486 and on games like Doom.

However, for other DOS games (anything pre-Doom basically, and even some pre-Quake stuff) I think you should be fine with the ET4000AX, but with an ISA VGA I wouldn't bother going beyond a DX2-66 CPU. Depends on the games you want to play really.

And a DX4 100Mhz can’t mitigate the bad performance of the 40000? on my DX2 is very slow when multiple sprite are on screen, this type of problem is more relative to CPU or Graphic card? because where the screen are free from enemy the game run not bad.

No amount of cpu power can compensatae for the ISA bandwidth and/or memory bandwidth bottlenecks.

From my bad memory I was of the understanding that E4000s weren't that great in Dos but were the bomb in Windows.

i think that this 4000AX was great for games prior Doom, i ask only if puttin a DX4 instead of DX2 can help to play Doom smoot, assuming that the games become unplayable when the enemy are a lot on screen or i am in the open map outside. I really not understand if in my case it is lack of power of the cpu or not.

Performance is a matter of bottlenecks. The slowest link in the chain determines the outcome. For overall framerate it will certainly help to have a faster CPU, as wherever the CPU was the bottleneck, it will go faster. However if the slowdowns are already due to VGA bottleneck, those slowdowns won't get any faster at all. So bigger numbers but probably not more playable.

That said, if you have the CPU, stick it in and see what happens.

dionb wrote:

Performance is a matter of bottlenecks. The slowest link in the chain determines the outcome. For overall framerate it will certainly help to have a faster CPU, as wherever the CPU was the bottleneck, it will go faster. However if the slowdowns are already due to VGA bottleneck, those slowdowns won't get any faster at all. So bigger numbers but probably not more playable.

That said, if you have the CPU, stick it in and see what happens.

Unfortunately I don't have a DX4 to do the test, and this mainboard only accepts 5V and a DX4 overdrive is really expensive and you have to buy it without going to trial.

I also know that the slow component of a PC makes the PC's performance go at maximum with the speed of the slowest component. But with the indications I gave you you can't understand if it's the slow CPU or the graphics card that is bottlenecked? in Doom in tight corners indoors the graphics are very fluid, but when there are open spaces with large spaces it starts to slow down a lot, it slows down a lot even when there are many enemies on the screen.

Sounds like a cpu bottleneck. DX4 should help. Also reduce screen size to see if that also helps.

Caluser2000 wrote:

From my bad memory I was of the understanding that E4000s weren't that great in Dos but were the bomb in Windows.

ET4000s are among the best in terms of VGA performance, as far as ISA cards go.
Even the VLB versions of the ET4000 are very good, although there are some newer chips that perform better there.
In Windows, ET4000 is nothing special. The later ET4000s (the W32-ones) have some basic Windows acceleration, mainly hardware bitblt, but can't hold a candle to 'proper' Windows accelerators from S3, Matrox and the like.

appiah4 wrote:

Sounds like a cpu bottleneck. DX4 should help. Also reduce screen size to see if that also helps.

In fact, I tried to do a logical reasoning based on what type of slowdowns I noticed on video. I don't know if you noticed, I have the 4000AX, that is the ISA and not the VLBUS, do you have your idea on the DX4? In 1993/94 my first pc was just a DX2 like this, almost certainly with a WT cache like this. I expected to see in my current 486 fluid Doom as I remembered it in 1994 in my DX2, but probably in those years we had a different concept of fluidity