VOGONS


First post, by red_avatar

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OK, this is an area that is quite unknown to me. I know that non-integrated cards heavily depend on the connection type - ISA, PCI, VLB, ... - but I was unaware that graphics cards of the same connection type could also have major performance differences.

To give you an idea, I have 2 HP Vectra VE 5/75 machines - one is a series 1, the other a series 2. Both have integrated Cirrus Logic chips. - 5430 for series 1, 5436 for series 2. The performance difference between these two is quite amazing however - benchmarks see a 30% difference between the two in games like Magic Carpet, Quake, etc. I know that part of it is the system's architecture but they're both socket 7 systems, both integrated cards use PCI, both use similar EDO memory, both have a Pentium 75 with identical cache.

So my question is: would DOS benefit from more modern cards like the Voodoo Banshee? I always thought games had to be programmed a certain way to take advantages but the performance difference above kind of threw me.

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Reply 1 of 11, by BinaryDemon

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Yes, as long as compatibility isn’t garbage I would guess generally the more modern the card the better the performance.

It probably has to do with how vram speed and bandwidth evolved over the years.

Here’s an interesting thread with much more modern cards tested in dos: Old+Modern videocards pure DOS benchmarking- which one is fastest?, need your numbers + analysis, 320x200 to 1600x1200!

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 2 of 11, by The Serpent Rider

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So my question is: would DOS benefit from more modern cards like the Voodoo Banshee? I always thought games had to be programmed a certain way to take advantages but the performance difference above kind of threw me.

PCI Video cards benchmark: Electric Boogaloo Edition

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Reply 3 of 11, by derSammler

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BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:41:

Yes, as long as compatibility isn’t garbage I would guess generally the more modern the card the better the performance.

From my tests: no. The newer the card, the worse the performance is when BIOS calls are used. But it all depends on the definition of "modern".

Reply 4 of 11, by red_avatar

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derSammler wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:53:
BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:41:

Yes, as long as compatibility isn’t garbage I would guess generally the more modern the card the better the performance.

From my tests: no. The newer the card, the worse the performance is when BIOS calls are used. But it all depends on the definition of "modern".

Well any pre-2000 card since native DOS was still a concern then.

Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870

Reply 5 of 11, by BinaryDemon

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derSammler wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:53:
BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:41:

Yes, as long as compatibility isn’t garbage I would guess generally the more modern the card the better the performance.

From my tests: no. The newer the card, the worse the performance is when BIOS calls are used. But it all depends on the definition of "modern".

Yeah I was debating if I should have said something about VESA modes vs others since Doom benchmarks don’t show the same improvements as Quake.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 6 of 11, by auron

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red_avatar wrote on 2020-03-18, 10:54:

So my question is: would DOS benefit from more modern cards like the Voodoo Banshee? I always thought games had to be programmed a certain way to take advantages but the performance difference above kind of threw me.

software rendering video speed in DOS just comes down to how fast the framebuffer can be copied from RAM to video RAM. everything in that chain can influence speed. the only other thing to consider is banked vs. linear VESA modes (the latter being a thing just in build games and quake mainly).

fast contemporary pci cards like the matrox millennium and s3 vision/trio64 should easily max out a p75, a banshee would work too but would be kind of a waste for obvious reasons.

Reply 7 of 11, by Jo22

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I've got the feeling that VGA compatibility since a while is nolonger important beyond getting through the Windows installation.
But even for that, and Linux, VBE 3 is all it needs. Makes me wonder why and howlong they still bother to include a full CRTC in silicon.
However, If BIOS goes away in 2020, so should also VGA BIOS. What will happen to the VBE BIOS Extension then ?

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Reply 8 of 11, by ruthan

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All important links are really in my thread linked above..
My thread is proof that even some very modern cards sucks. For P75 there is Phils old DB - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9n … wpNU/edit#gid=0 .. which only missing higher resolutions that is reason why i started my thread. There are quite big differences.. you can get just fastest cards.. but there is also some Dos games compatibility sheet of corner cases and some obscure games.. and you have find what is more important for you.
PCI for sure.. If you plan to dual boot to Windows you would need something faster and more memory.. is good to avoid cards, which needs some driver / utility for VBE2.

If you are care really only about Dos and 2D, this Phils video is good one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_5suEoXTc8 i would also recommend also ATI cards, ATI was on market for long time - so compatibility was good and speed too.. Tseng is usually expensive and S3 and Cirrus logic needs drivers, Voodoo 3 and Banshee had some compatibility issue in DOS, same as Nvidia cards, because they started to sell when DOS era was at the end.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 9 of 11, by Swiego

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red_avatar wrote on 2020-03-18, 12:07:
derSammler wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:53:
BinaryDemon wrote on 2020-03-18, 11:41:

Yes, as long as compatibility isn’t garbage I would guess generally the more modern the card the better the performance.

From my tests: no. The newer the card, the worse the performance is when BIOS calls are used. But it all depends on the definition of "modern".

Well any pre-2000 card since native DOS was still a concern then.

I do not believe this to be entirely true either. I have been benchmarking cards on my P90 and have found some surprises. One, for example, is that the Millennium appears faster in DOS than the newer Millennium II whereas the latter is faster in Windows 98 on the same machine. This leads me to believe that even in the late 1990s, DOS speed was being traded for GUI acceleration as newer products were released.

I realize that my results are not consistent with some of the benchmark compilations referenced on this thread, however those references typically place these older cards in much newer systems presumably to eliminate CPU bottlenecks. I wonder whether in an old system where the CPU indeed does bottleneck, whether differences in the BIOS, chip design, wait states etc. could cause a newer card to perform more poorly.

Reply 11 of 11, by BinaryDemon

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peg wrote on 2020-03-20, 07:40:

All I can say is that if you want to play Doom , stay far, far away from any Rendition Verite based cards. It will turn a pentium into a 386.

Sad but true, other than that major flaw I really like Rendition cards. A poor mans Voodoo.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!