The 868 is on my list, I just haven't found one at the right price. I would guess that 868 DOS performance should be identical to Trio64. Adding the 805 to the list would be interesting too.

Did you use UNIVBE for these graphic card benchmarks? I've noticed that the benchmark results are different when using UNIVBE.

So the Trio64 is just a Vision864 with integrated RAMDAC? Were there any other performance improvements?

I am curious why the Trio64 is faster in DOS compared to the Vision968. I thought the 96x cards were the next generation of cards compared to the 86x cards. Is it that S3-based DRAM cards generally perform better in DOS compared to VRAM cards?

I don't believe VBE was loaded for the tests.
As far as I know the only major change to the Trio64 over the 864 was the RAMDAC. Many 864s used an 8-bit RAMDAC, so compared to those cards the Trio64 should offer a better windows experience on a CRT due to support for higher refresh rates. Most of the Diamond 864 cards seem to have the 16-bit RAMDAC equipped as far as I can tell.

I can't recall exactly when the Trio64 came out in relation to the 868 and 968, but as the 968 is VRAM it is indeed a little slower in DOS, but for a VRAM card it's still very fast. I was surprised to see that on the Mach64 cards the DOS performance was identical in both the DRAM and VRAM versions.

It does make we wonder how accurate the benchmarks are though. PCPBench VESA MODE 100 increased by 1 FPS when UNIVBE was loaded. I may need to redo some comparisons now that I have possession of a VLB Trio64. The Trio64 does allow for setting the Transparent option in the BIOS, which automatically increases speed compared to Synchronize, which is what the S3 Vision968 needs for stability.

Anyone know how to update the BIOSes on these cards to "fix" all the VESA modes?

Where would a 2 MB VLB Cirrus Logic-based CL-5434 fit into the benchmarks for DOS and Windows?

I believe the CL 5434 isn't spectacular in Windows. It's probably a little slower than the DRAM based Mach64. I remember either the 16-bit or 24-bit mode was really slow.

Do you still have it? Would you be willing to run the DOS and Windows benchmarks with it on the same system?

I've never owned a CL GD5434 based VLB card, only the Speedstar64 ISA. Even if I had one, there's no way I could test as all of my stuff is sealed in wooden crates.

Where do you think the GD5434 would fit in for DOS? Between the Mach64 and the Vision968? Or just ahead of the Vision968?

Upon looking at the results again, it would be interesting to run the S3 968 in Windows and the S3 Trio64 in DOS. Is there a way to switch between two VLB graphic cards in the same system without removing the cards? And without having to swap the monitor cable around?

What you are proposing is technically possible, but probably very difficult to pull off. You need a 968 card that allows you to disable its vga core. That would allOw two graphics cards to coexist. The bigger problem is going to be the pass through cable. Most cards use the older feature connector that only lets you pass through 8 bit colour. It's not necessarily a problem if you don't need high colour mode in dos. There was a later version of the feature connector that resembles a 68 pin scsi connector. That one supports 24 bit colour. It was somewhat common on number nine cards. The other problem with using feature connectors is that on some cards they only support input or only output and do not allow any user configuration. So two cards that only do input would not be able to transfer data over the feature connector.