First post, by SpocksBeer
Hello all,
Just thought I'd share my experiences recently with finding the right video card for my system. The system in question is a P133, 64mb RAM. Nothing special, I have faster systems elsewhere, but this is my current project and should make a nice DOS era PC.
It came originally with a S3 Trio 64V+. It worked fine, but I found the video output, when pared with the CRT I'm using (Samsung 753DFX) to be very washed out. Shadow details in dark games like Heretic were poor. This is of course a known problem with the black level of many S3 cards (see here), though I didn't realise the it affected Trios as well as the Virge series. I obtained a Diamond 4MB Virge/DX and confirmed that the S3Bright utility would change the black levels. This definitely improved things over the Trio, but it still wasn't great.
I had a Macronix MX82600 lying around, and to my surprise the image quality of this card was vastly superior to the Virge when driving this monitor. Black levels and brightness were greatly improved, to the point of being able to turn down the brightness on the monitor itself. At this point I started doing some DOS benchmarking, just using Phils scripts. Unfortunately the MX82600 turned out to be quite slow, so the search continued.
Next I tried a Voodoo Rush from IO-Data. This performed well, but the image quality was only on par with the Virge. Also, the default BIOS has a really weird looking DOS font.
Next, a Trident TGUI9440. This turned out to be the worst performer of all, also with only "OK" image quality.
Finally I found an ET6000. This turned out to be the best of both worlds, great performance and black levels like the Macronix. Success! Paired with a Voodoo1 this should be an excellent DOS gamer.
I've attached my benchmarking results, should anyone else be interested.
Happy retro!
