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Quick Q about vid card comparison (Vesa Compatibility)

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First post, by WIN-Jiggi

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I just got a 4MB Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3-ViRGE Chipset). I was mainly looking for DOS graphics performance but the amount of RAM on the card I bought sold me. It was only 5 bucks.

But looks like Tseng's line of chipsets seem to be the best. But then if you want to get one, it will cost you an arm and a leg.

Wiki does mention that the Stealth 64 Graphics 2001 card also does a good job with DOS performance.

With all that said, I'm wondering if my 3D 2K card is fine for dos games and if the Vesa support is good. I'll be running a Pentium MMX 233MHz with 64MB PC66 SDRAM in DOS 6.01(?) No Windows.

I'll be playing all the first person shooters for DOS (Wolf3d, Blake Stone, Doom, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake...)

Reply 1 of 5, by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

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Diamond Stealth has pretty good VESA compatibility --and compatibility is what matters when playing DOS games. Don't worry too much about video card performance when running unaccelerated DOS games in hi-res; CPU speed is more important for that purpose. Why don't you use Pentium III or above, by the way?

Never thought this thread would be that long, but now, for something different.....
Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman.

Reply 2 of 5, by WIN-Jiggi

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I'm doing some testing on older parts with certain games to see if they are effected by certain hardware.

Right now I have a 1Ghz Celeron with a 32MB AGP card with probably some non matching fsb ram, and some games don't run so good. They run but they run a little crazy. For instance Alien Trilogy: Everything in that game is speed up 50 times. Nerves of Steel crashes when the first map loads.

Another example you might be able to catch now that doesn't necessarily have to do with hardware is try running Quake in dos under Win9x. Everything is speed up. But when you run it in 6.01 it runs just fine...

Reply 3 of 5, by swaaye

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WIN-Jiggi wrote:

Wiki does mention that the Stealth 64 Graphics 2001 card also does a good job with DOS performance.

That particular Stealth uses an Ark Logic chipset that is very, very fast for DOS. Only thing faster is probably Tseng ET6000 or perhaps Voodoo3/Banshee (buggy tho).

The trickiest part of DOS isn't necessarily speed though; it's VESA compatibility. The S3 chips are perhaps the best here because of how prevalent they were back then. They got a lot of attention by game devs. There is also a S3 VBE 2.0 TSR out there for them, and UNIVBE of course supports them.

DOSBOX emulates a S3 card by default because of this.

Reply 4 of 5, by WIN-Jiggi

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Thanks for the info. I was able to find these files...

Update: Links below contain GOOD a version of S3VBE20.EXE:

- http://gepardstudio.4ezi.com/files/s3vbe20.zip ( v3.18 )
- http://www1.vobis.de/bbs/support/brett01/s3vbe20.zip ( v3.02 )

Links below contain a BAD version of S3VBE20.EXE!:

- http://ftp.abacus.cz/pub/support/drivery/video/_s3/s3vbe/ ( v3.14 )
- http://drivers.vestel.bg/S3/Utilities/S3VBE/ ( v3.14 )
- http://www.usv.ro/ftp/pub/drivers/video/S3/VI … GX2/UTIL/S3VBE/ ( v3.14 )
- http://mephitus.no-ip.org/archive/Software/DO … ies/s3vbe20.zip ( 3.13 )

Last edited by WIN-Jiggi on 2008-01-19, 10:58. Edited 1 time in total.
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