VOGONS


First post, by Jed118

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I have done some benchmarking (thanks to Phil for having them on his website) and I have come up some results.

The test machine is a 486/66 with VLB, 32 Mb RAM, DOS 6.22.

Here are the results for the Tseng - 2MB RAM all from factory (soldered on)

3d Bench - 47.6
3d Bench2 - 46.5
LM6.0 - 13284 chr/sec
PCPBench - 4.6 (640x400 8bpp)
Chris's bench - 31.3

Here are the results for the S3 (1Mb RAM, with 1 Mb expanded via 80ns chips from a 286 motherboard upgrade)

3d Bench - 50
3d Bench2 - 48.1
LM6.0 - 16661.89 chr/sec
PCPBench - could not load (even after UNIVBE - I can't make out the error, I don't speak German)
Chris's bench - 27.8

I'm wondering how much of an impact the 8 44256 chips have, as they are 20ns slower than the on-board RAM. Would it perform faster with quicker RAM?
Despite this, it is still the faster card, it seems.

Thoughts? Which one of these would you guys keep for gaming? Personally, I HATE S3 cards, I had a bad run in with them several times in the mid 90s when I worked at a computer store (PCI cards) - We always sold them much cheaper than ATI cards for some reason. Despite that, this VLB card is pretty neat, it has even a jumper for over 40MHz bus speeds.

Recommendations?

*edit - For the hell of it I ran the benches on some ISA cards I had kicking around:

Tseng 4000EX 1Mb ISA (upgraded from 512k)

3d Bench - 26.3
3d Bench2 - 25.7
LM6.0 - 2329.48 chr/sec
PCPBench - 3.1 (640x400 8bpp)
Chris's bench - 26.9
(not too bad for an ISA!)

Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 1Mb ISA

3d Bench - 26.3
3d Bench2 - 25.7
LM6.0 - 2329.48 chr/sec
PCPBench - Won't start (VESA Modus 1000 konnte nicht initialisiert werden!!! - I feel threatened somehow.)
Chris's bench - 26.9

Are the above two the same card? EXACT same results.

Trident 9000 512k ISA

3d Bench - 21.7
3d Bench2 - 21.3
LM6.0 - 1755.43 chr/sec
PCPBench - 2.9 (640x400 8bpp)
Chris's bench - 13.4
(goes right back into the 286)

Last edited by Jed118 on 2017-12-01, 03:08. Edited 2 times in total.

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Reply 1 of 5, by clueless1

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It's a toss up and you likely wouldn't notice a difference with either card. Since you have "issues" with S3, just go with the Tseng. I considered it the sexier VGA core during this time, so that's what I would do. 😎

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 2 of 5, by Jed118

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Thanks for your input - Can you shed some light on the identical ISA results I edited in no doubt during your post?

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 3 of 5, by clueless1

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Jed118 wrote:

Thanks for your input - Can you shed some light on the identical ISA results I edited in no doubt during your post?

I think both are considered very fast chipsets and probably the ISA bus is bottlenecking them on the fast system.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 5 of 5, by idspispopd

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Regarding the RAM chips on the S3: The clock is determined by the card's BIOS so faster chips won't make the card faster automatically. I don't know if the clock can be modified easily, MCLK targets only Trio and newer chips.
The ISA cards definitely both max out the ISA bus. A 386DX can definitely saturate the ISA bus, at least for the simple transfer from RAM. Of course in an actual game it will need more time to compute the scene.
Just look at http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/benchmarks - the fastest ISA cards are at a tie.