Hehe (that S3 is 4mb dude).

I don't have much experience with SVGA games from that period on such a system.

What I do know is that the S3 isn't great with all VGA (I encountered minor to major glitches using it) and in the few higher res games I play viz. Gabriel Knight 2 I found the difference between a Tseng ET4000/W32p and a S3 964 to be minimal.

Since all those cards most likely run every SVGA game without problems I'd test them with the few VGA games you plan to play. You can't predict anomalies like that.

samudra wrote:

Hehe (that S3 is 4mb dude). […]
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Hehe (that S3 is 4mb dude).

I don't have much experience with SVGA games from that period on such a system.

What I do know is that the S3 isn't great with all VGA (I encountered minor to major glitches using it) and in the few higher res games I play viz. Gabriel Knight 2 I found the difference between a Tseng ET4000/W32p and a S3 964 to be minimal.

Since all those cards most likely run every SVGA game without problems I'd test them with the few VGA games you plan to play. You can't predict anomalies like that.

Yeah, I bet for these old games it really doesn't matter so much which card to use...I bet they're equal in performance...and the Tseng is probably the worst card for Windows maybe

doh! I didn't know the S3 was 4mb...but it had alot of mem chips on it 😉

Must upgrade the tseng to full 2mb with the empty ram sockets

I have all three of these cards. This is how I feel about them:

I have an ATi Mach64 VRAM card. The VRAM version is probably one of the best VLB cards you can get for Windows. It's fast, the drivers are pretty stable, and the output quality is nice. The DOS performance is maybe better than average. I don't know a lot about the DRAM version, but I heard it is slightly (but not a lot) faster in DOS. Obviously it's not a great Windows card since it only has 1MB and inferior RAMDAC.

I have a few S3 964 cards though I don't use them much. Two of them are Diamonds, and I don't really care much for Diamond. All 964 cards use VRAM, which usually makes them more suitable for Windows. I would say that the S3 964 is a little faster than the Mach64 VRAM. The S3 cards should have good compatibility as long as you're loading the VB extensions.

My ET4000W32P has 2MB of DRAM. I believe the 2nd meg of RAM is necessary to get a nice speedup in DOS with memory interleaving. I would say this card is about 1.5 times faster in DOS than the Mach64 and 964. As far as I know the only other VLB card that can compare with the W32P is the ARK1000. I also have one of those but have not tested it yet. The W32i should also be a good card. I'm not sure about the W32. I think the W32 had some problems. The W32p isn't a great card for Windows, but I've used a lot worse. I honestly didn't think it was that bad.

The bottom line is all 3 cards should be pretty good for DOS, but in terms of raw speed the Tseng is clearly superior.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I have all three of these cards. This is how I feel about them: […]
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I have all three of these cards. This is how I feel about them:

I have an ATi Mach64 VRAM card. The VRAM version is probably one of the best VLB cards you can get for Windows. It's fast, the drivers are pretty stable, and the output quality is nice. The DOS performance is maybe better than average. I don't know a lot about the DRAM version, but I heard it is slightly (but not a lot) faster in DOS. Obviously it's not a great Windows card since it only has 1MB and inferior RAMDAC.

I have a few S3 964 cards though I don't use them much. Two of them are Diamonds, and I don't really care much for Diamond. All 964 cards use VRAM, which usually makes them more suitable for Windows. I would say that the S3 964 is a little faster than the Mach64 VRAM. The S3 cards should have good compatibility as long as you're loading the VB extensions.

My ET4000W32P has 2MB of DRAM. I believe the 2nd meg of RAM is necessary to get a nice speedup in DOS with memory interleaving. I would say this card is about 1.5 times faster in DOS than the Mach64 and 964. As far as I know the only other VLB card that can compare with the W32P is the ARK1000. I also have one of those but have not tested it yet. The W32i should also be a good card. I'm not sure about the W32. I think the W32 had some problems. The W32p isn't a great card for Windows, but I've used a lot worse. I honestly didn't think it was that bad.

The bottom line is all 3 cards should be pretty good for DOS, but in terms of raw speed the Tseng is clearly superior.

Dunno if it's a VRAM card my mach64.....

The weird thing with the Asus VLB mobo I have is that no gfx card supported by univbe so far works with it..it just says it can't find any supported SVGA chip 😜

So it looks like I will use the Tseng card...must first find an old gfx card with two socketed ram chips to steal and put on the tseng so I have might 2mb on the card 😁

You might want to check out this thread if you haven't seen it already.

Which vlb video card to get?

If SVGA means Windows and Windows games in this context (hadn't thought of that) then yes cards with the high end S3 chipsets will perform better than the Tseng eventhough that W32P is also an accelerator.

Be on the lookout for cards with the Weitek P9000 (like the Diamond Viper). That one has very fast Windows acceleration, but the performance under DOS can even be called poor. I still have ads of it and reviews in old mags.

Interesting the ARK1000 is named. That is indeed a very fast card. I owned one and was surprised at the speed compared with the Tseng and wondered, and still do, why nobody ever talks about it.

I had a Viper VLB once. It used a Oak chip for DOS. It is very, very slow in DOS. The Number Nine Imagine 128 does the same thing actually, with a Windows accelerator chip and a cheap, slow secondary chip for VGA compatibility. The Windows drivers are questionable for Viper, especially if you are considering Win95. Diamond was really bad at producing driver updates. Personally, I'd stay away from these cards unless you just want to mess around with one of the more intriguing Windows co-processor boards. Something like a S3 ViRGE, Vision, or Trio 64 would be much better all-around (compatibility and speed.) Viper wasn't the fastest Windows card for long and certainly wasn't once Win95 came around.

See the Oak OTI-087 VGA chip? 😀 It has its own super-slow DRAM too.

Viper Info. Looks like later Weitek chips had built-in DOS compatibility.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~torsten/viper/models.html

S3 cards are really unbeatable for compatibility with DOS games. I've also found GeForce FX cards to be capable and extremely fast DOS cards.

Thanks for clearing that up.

I too once owned a card based on the Weitek P9000 and OAK combo, not from Diamond but from PCG.

Popped it in, turned on my box and I could actually almost follow the RAM test counter with my bare eyes. So I'm sitting there thinking: "I know dos performance is bad with this card, but it can't be this bad. The card has to be broken". Guess I was wrong, hah!

Took it out and never gave it a second thought.

It is actually kind of hilarious in a demented way especially considering the original price tag of that card.

Well it's just that it was designed primarily for GUI use. Apparently they couldn't be bothered to develop a decent VGA engine and just outsourced to the cheapest alternative. It's also possible that they couldn't integrate a VGA engine with a GUI accelerator due to manufacturing limits back then....

From what I know about ARK, they came out too late (1995) to sell many VLB boards. I think the company only lasted for a couple of years, and most of the cards I see with the ARK chip are PCI bus. I believe that cards like the Hercules Stingray VLB version were special order only, but I could be wrong.

I think that VLB cards using ARK1000 are a little faster than ET4000W32P, but not much. I also heard that they are sensitive to bus speed. The ET4000W32P is probably a better choice if you plan to run a 40 or 50MHz VL bus. So far all of the ARK1000 VLB cards I've seen use 70ns DRAMs, which seems a tad slow to me. My Hercules Dynamite Power (et4000w32p) has 45ns DRAMs on it! I'm wondering if perhaps the faster RAM could be the reason the ET4000W32P is a better overclocker.

I'm not sure how well the ARK1000 and ARK2000 PCI cards compared to the competition ate the time. I certainly never heard of them. Probably the ET6000 ate them for breakfast. ET6000 was VL bus compatible, but I am pretty sure no VLB cards using that chip were ever produced.

I used a Weitek P9100 based card in the days (DSystems Ultracad Papilio G1-2)
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/papilio_ultracad.jpg
and my experience is:
The chip itself appeared on ISA and PCI cards and belongs to the early PCI chips.
From the hardware side it typically uses VRAM and at most the IBM DAC525 which delivers a very good 2D signal quality. That is compareable or even better than a Matrox Millenium (depends a bit on the specific card).
It has quite decent Win32 Acceleration speed, Hardware Cursor support and PCI Busmastering.
In plain DOS it is quite slow. (check f.e. speed measurements at: http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=536 )
There it is just a bit faster than a ET4000AX ISA.
In plain DOS there is also only a VESA 1.4 driver that enables support for SVGA modes, but no speedup.

In a Win9x Dosbox the Win9x driver gives VBE 2.0 support, though I have no speed rating number available now. My guess is that it is a bit faster (LFB and stuff).

Another small drawback is, if you own a 2 MB card and some game requires a 2 MB graphics card. Since the Weitek P9100 take some kB memory for itself the card does not count as 2 MB card and games like 'Silver' will fail. This does not appear with the 4 MB version ofcourse.

Afterall if you own a 4 MB version of this card with the 230 MHz DAC and use Win9x, playing DOS games in the Win9x DOSBox this card is useable.

I have a Winner 2000 AVI which uses a S3 Vision 968, which is a PCI card. Other than the border color is always black, I didn't encounter any incompatibilities with DOS games.
It has working, but not too efficient VESA BIOS. In some games, the SciTech Display Doctor (which they released the DOS version as freeware some years ago) can significantly improve performance and also makes some more resolutions available. The Display Doctor is useful for almost any old graphics card. You can also tweak the timing with it.

My card has 2 MB, though it was also available as a 4 MB version.
I think, 2 MB is fine, as the real high resolutions are too slow on old machines anyways. I didn't ever played a DOS game which required more than 640x480.

Amigaz wrote:

I plan to play SVGA games

Do you plan to play 3D, texture-mapped, unacellerated SVGA games? If that's the case, then even a Pentium 100 is too slow for the purpose.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Amigaz wrote:

I plan to play SVGA games

Do you plan to play 3D, texture-mapped, unacellerated SVGA games? If that's the case, then even a Pentium 100 is too slow for the purpose.

nope, mostly games like Wing Commander III, Nascar, Formula GP 2
Might have problems with F1 GP2 though which needs alot of juice....plan to play Apache longbow and Hind too

Nascar was pretty heavy stuff.

I remember how back then people were complaining they couldn't run it perfectly even on their new systems, much like Crysis now. It really was made for the system of tomorrow.

I tried it on my 5x86/Tseng for you.

Running it for the first time (in 320x) it turns off all eye candy (don't know if it probes the system, I think not). Running it like this is very smooth. Turning on all options it runs noticeably slower, it clearly isn't running as it should anymore.

Running it in 640x with everything on is very choppy. Turning off all eye candy in 640x is still slower than running it in 320x with everything on.

Note, I was trying this out in the practice mode so there were no opponents. It will probably be very bad in an actual race.

Quote from the manual (emphasis mine):

13. Pentium Performence It should be known that even with a Pentium 90Mhz machine with a fast video card it is unlikely tha […]
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13. Pentium Performence
It should be known that even with a Pentium 90Mhz machine with a fast
video card it is unlikely that you will be able to have all the graphic
textures on in SVGA mode. But, with only a few things like the grass and
asphalt turned off, it should be acceptable. The big difference with a
Pentium and SVGA mode is how crisp and clear everything appears. You can
see much further down the track making it easier to plan you next move.

nascar still ran like a dog on a pentium 75 o/c'd to 90mhz

The only answer is a PIII-E 600 or so! 😈 I found that it took that much CPU to get Cybermage completely smooth in SVGA, if you can believe it. With the wicked fast VGA core of a GeForce FX, no less. A PIII-450 wasn't quite enough. I was a little stunned, honestly.