They just aren't all that exciting, which is why you don't read much about them, but yeah they are certainly capable of playing DOS games. These are the sort of cards you'd get in your basic mid '90s SOHO Pentium PC. It'll be slower in DOS than Voodoo3 and GeForce 4, but that might be a good thing in some cases.

You don't really use drivers for DOS games. Some games look for VESA VBE support for higher resolutions and color depth, and the card will have some version of that built into its BIOS. There is a free utility called UniVBE that will upgrade it to VBE 2.0/3.0 and games sometimes include that. It's usually only something to worry about if you run into problems with a game.

RAM upgrades are about higher resolutions + color depths in Windows. I don't think it's worthwhile unless you just want a project. The other cards are much faster Windows accelerators and probably have much better VGA signal quality too.

I had that card in childhood Am5x86 PC (MB-8443UUD).
As stated it's a bit "out of date" for a Pentium III, and in the other thread about this chip, it's stated that it actually might be a bit better compared to the S3 Trio64V+, but the problem was that it was late, so it was relegated to budget machines like anything shipping with an Am5x86.

I will tell you about a problem with it I encountered as a ten-year-old and never solved, though I since recall something about a TSR that might involve this. With the game "The Pack Rat" by Steve Blanding, all the text was totally scrambled. And I'm not sure if the problem is with the Video BIOS on the CL-GD5446, or the Award motherboard BIOS on the MB-8433UUD since I believe there may be font glyphs for graphics mode available in either.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-05-15, 02:47:

I had that card in childhood Am5x86 PC (MB-8443UUD).
As stated it's a bit "out of date" for a Pentium III, and in the other thread about this chip, it's stated that it actually might be a bit better compared to the S3 Trio64V+, but the problem was that it was late, so it was relegated to budget machines like anything shipping with an Am5x86.

I will tell you about a problem with it I encountered as a ten-year-old and never solved, though I since recall something about a TSR that might involve this. With the game "The Pack Rat" by Steve Blanding, all the text was totally scrambled. And I'm not sure if the problem is with the Video BIOS on the CL-GD5446, or the Award motherboard BIOS on the MB-8433UUD since I believe there may be font glyphs for graphics mode available in either.

i agree, the old Cirrus Logic card would be better suited to a P1-ish era system

DOS gaming may be fine with the voodoo3 and slowing down the CPU / disabling cache / etc.

I did some quick and dirty benches in my P1 system a little while back. I hadn't heard of the 5446 at the time, so I was surprised to see it beat the S3's and come second only to an ARK2000.

https://forums.overclockers.com.au/posts/18990366/

I haven't ever given it an extended run to gauge compatibility. Cool card to have in the kit for similar builds though.

Pierre32 wrote on 2023-05-17, 01:27:

I did some quick and dirty benches in my P1 system a little while back. I hadn't heard of the 5446 at the time, so I was surprised to see it beat the S3's and come second only to an ARK2000.

https://forums.overclockers.com.au/posts/18990366/

I haven't ever given it an extended run to gauge compatibility. Cool card to have in the kit for similar builds though.

Banked VESA video modes on S3 cards are usually slow without resorting to S3SPDUP (requires S3VBE20), so it isn't surprising to see lower scores in both SVGA benchmarks. The only S3 card that score well in those tests was the Compaq ViRGE/GX because it has VBE 2.0 onboard.

Have you just tried your GF4? Nvidia's VBE implementation on those weren't too bad yet. No TSR's needed, it should just work.

gen_angry wrote on 2023-05-17, 02:25:

Have you just tried your GF4? Nvidia's VBE implementation on those weren't too bad yet. No TSR's needed, it should just work.

Yep, the VBE implementation on older nVidia cards are decent. UniRefresh or VBEHz can be used to set the screen refresh rate for each resolution.

The only exception is that they don't support 15bpp video modes that some games use (Alien Trilogy's high color option is one of these).

Though Riva128 is supported by UniVBE to get those 15-bit modes. And it has superb DOS performance. And when it's not about 15-bit, it supports a great pile of crazy low res VESA modes like 400x300.
The main difference between this and Voodoo3 is that its truecolor modes are 32-bit while Voodoo offers 24-bit modes.

alvaro84 wrote on 2023-05-18, 02:54:

Though Riva128 is supported by UniVBE to get those 15-bit modes. And it has superb DOS performance. And when it's not about 15-bit, it supports a great pile of crazy low res VESA modes like 400x300.

That's nice to know. People think that UniVBE on such card is not useful because they come with VBE 3.0 onboard.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-05-17, 02:41:

Yep, the VBE implementation on older nVidia cards are decent. UniRefresh or VBEHz can be used to set the screen refresh rate for each resolution.

The only exception is that they don't support 15bpp video modes that some games use (Alien Trilogy's high color option is one of these).

offtopic: with a little hackery, SDD 6.53 could be run on later TNT/Geforce cards as well, with 15bpp/oddball lowres like 512x384 working :) (full announcement post coming tomorrow)

wbc wrote on 2023-06-01, 19:37:

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-05-17, 02:41:

Yep, the VBE implementation on older nVidia cards are decent. UniRefresh or VBEHz can be used to set the screen refresh rate for each resolution.

The only exception is that they don't support 15bpp video modes that some games use (Alien Trilogy's high color option is one of these).

offtopic: with a little hackery, SDD 6.53 could be run on later TNT/Geforce cards as well, with 15bpp/oddball lowres like 512x384 working 😀 (full announcement post coming tomorrow)

Excellent!! 👍

Looking forward for testing it. Good to see that you mentioned UNICENTR, it is always the first thing I run after UVCONFIG detected the video card successfully. 😁