You should be more concerned about compatibility and a faster host cpu.

Also are you asking which of the listed cards are fastest as far as real hardware or fastest as far as pcem is concerned?
If a card is the fastest at one game at a certain resolution but not one you would normally game with would that qualify?
I don't know if anyone has bothered to benchmark all of the above in pcem, I do know there are several threads here where real hardware has been testd.

I mean the fastest as a real hardware gets. I was just curious. I was not deep into gpu stuff back during this period (early and mid 90s), only since early 2000, when I started building my own PCs.

damson wrote on 2020-05-24, 21:32:

I mean the fastest as a real hardware gets. I was just curious. I was not deep into gpu stuff back during this period (early and mid 90s), only since early 2000, when I started building my own PCs.

Software only 3d graphics is really 2d graphics, so Voodoo 1 and 2 cards don't apply.

gdjacobs wrote on 2020-05-24, 22:01:

damson wrote on 2020-05-24, 21:32:

I mean the fastest as a real hardware gets. I was just curious. I was not deep into gpu stuff back during this period (early and mid 90s), only since early 2000, when I started building my own PCs.

Software only 3d graphics is really 2d graphics, so Voodoo 1 and 2 cards don't apply.

Yeah, I know - I copied the list from PCem site.

ATI Mach64VT and S3 ViRGE DX are emulated with 2d acceleration.

(though, S3 Trio64 does sometimes bring better DirectDraw performance than Virge for some reason)

Also Voodoo cards can apply to this if the DirectX game is a little too naive on letting you choose different hardware to render software rendering on (as per DirectX compliance), and they're the slowest option in that case, just like real life. 😀

Thanks for the info. I didn't tried Mach64VT yet. Does Windows 98SE inludes drivers for it, or do I have to hunt them down?

🤣, just got on https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/video-xpression.c3164
and read the card description.

The Video Xpression was a graphics card by ATI, launched in May 1996. Built on the 600 nm process, and based on the Mach64 graphics processor, in its Mach64 VT2 variant, the card does not support DirectX. Since Video Xpression does not support DirectX 11 or DirectX 12, it might not be able to run all the latest games. The Mach64 graphics processor is a relatively small chip with a die area of only 90 mm² and 1 million transistors. It features 1 pixel shader and 0 vertex shaders, 0 texture mapping units, and 1 ROP. Due to the lack of unified shaders you will not be able to run recent games at all (which require unified shader/DX10+ support). ATI has paired 1 MB EDO memory with the Video Xpression, which are connected using a 64-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 62 MHz, memory is running at 62 MHz.
Being a single-slot card, its power draw is not exactly known. Display outputs include: 1x VGA. Video Xpression is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI interface.

"might not be able to run all the latest games" ... you don't say ...

TechPowerup's hardware articles are machine generated and often contain misinformation (like that "doesn't support DirectX" tidbit right there)...dunno why certain places and folks treat them as an authorative source...