Again, I talked about some PCI video cards cannot be initialized on early boards like 486 PCI and some dumb boards like HX for pentium which I have and tried a TX board and got all of the cards going.

I have one 486 board with PCI slots and it works with maybe 1/3 of the PCI graphics cards I have.

what do yall recomend i look for then

Mach64VT should work on everything. Probably PCI contacts are too loose or card itself is just too dirty. That said, Mach64 series had very mediocre VGA performance, so typical S3 option would be much better.

Well my s3 trio64 us dead so I'll look for another

candle_86 wrote on 2020-09-21, 17:35:

what do yall recomend i look for then

The "best" graphics card I could get working in my Socket 3 machine was an SIS 305 16MB card, I also used an 8MB ATI 3d Rage Pro Turbo in there.

I posted about some of my experiences a while back here - SIS 305 16MB PCI

I preferred both to the S3 Virge I had, there was always a lot of "noise" on my LCD screen with the Virge.

Early ATI cards - limited VGA performance, which is major drawback for 486 system.
SIS 305 - also limited VGA performance, but probably decent VESA performance.

Cirrus Logic, Matrox , S3, Trident, Tseng are the common options for a 486.
You can get a list of chips and their compatibility here.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Obviously you don't need anything "modern" on a 486, Even the early poor performing 3D cards like the S3 Virge will be fine for a 486.