I think VESA is your best bet. Haven't seen any game needing more than 2.0 VESA (even version 1.2 should suffice). And for compatibility reasons I would choose (for games that don't support VESA natively):

+ ATi Rage, +, 3D, LT, 128. Have owned some of these. I always had a hell of a time with their drivers (OS/2 drivers were a nightmare and windows ones weren't better). Not recommended. Now i have a Radeon 9600, which is WAY BETTER.

+ Cirrus Logic CL-54XX models (ISA & PCI?). Good cards. A friend of mine had several of these. Never had any problems running games. I have seen what seems to be the same Quadtel chips on both CL and Trident cards, but CL performed better.

+ Intel i740. YEAH. Intel even made some mainstream PCI cards. I still have an i740 lying around. Decent acceleration but POOR, CRAPPY driver support (damn Intel). I discarded it almost inmediately. Intel has also released some integrated (built-in) video cards for its chipset designs.

+ Matrox Millenium, Mystique. I have never had any of those. But some people claim they were the best 2D cards ever made, both in terms of image quality and 2D acceleration. Too expensive for my taste.

+ nVIDIA TNT2. Good card with decent 2D acceleration, good VESA support and decent 3D acceleration too. A friend of mine is STILL USING THIS CARD FOR GAMING. Unbelievable. (But he was unabled to play his beloved Freedom Force 2, muahahahaha). Reason: No T&L engine yet.

+ OAK OTI 067/077. ISA only?. Very bad card. 067 wasn't even VGA registry compatible with some games. Awfully slow performer. It made possible for Trident cards to appear good. I think model 077 was slightly better.

+ Paradise PVGA - My AMSTRAD PC2086 had a PVGA 1A integrated on board. Most compatible VGA ever made. It has a video mode switcher that emulated all other standards (HERCULES, CGA, EGA) almost perfect. Too bad it had just 256KB of memory. But it was amazing being able to run Deluxe Paint Enhanced at 640x400x256c. I say to you, *AMAZING in 1988*

+ Permedia 2/3. I don't know much of these cards. I think they were expensive and aimed mostly at CAD design.

+ Rendition Verité. I think it was some *unsuccesful* 3D accelerator, right? Do Kyro cards fall into this category?

+ Trident (well documented and extended. Older ISA models (8900, 8900CL) were utter crap. Newer PCI models (3D Image 975) not so bad). Good 2D acceleration. Crappy 3D acceleration à-la S3.

+ S3. ViRGE, ViRGE DX,GX - well documented and extended. Good 2D acceleration. Some of them even claim to have 3D acceleration to some degree. I have always considered this a joke. I have even seem some bundled games with propietary S3 versions (Descent, I think, and Tomb Raider).

+ SiS 6326 AGP (Don't know if PCI exists). Does anybody remember this card? Yes, sometime I had one of these. BEST VESA 2.O SUPPORT EVAH.... And with the right drivers you would even get OpenGL acceleration (albeit fucking slow for my 4MB card) for Quake 2. Hooray!

+ TSENG. The ET4000 was ISA I think. Very known in the good ole' ms-dos days. Very compatible. Did they ever produced any VL-Bus or PCI models? I think there exists a ET6000 model too. I have never used any TSENG card.

+ Any good 2D card + Voodoo card combo: For those pesky GLIDE games.

Ah, this post makes feel nostalgic... 😁

PS - Sorted all brands by alpha.

+ ET6000 - very good chipset. Much better feeling than ET4000. Very fast as well, probably one of the fastest 2D graphics (it uses 128-bit memory bus), Vesa 2.0. It uses MDRAM instead of more common DRAM or VRAM (supposedly MDRAM provides better speed than DRAM, while much cheaper than VRAM), most cards had 2.25MB that should be enough for 1024x768x24 altough none of the drivers provided that display mode. Still have one in my linux server 😉

I actually have a Permedia 2 on the graphic card of my Amiga 😎

It's a good 2D GPU, but the 3D acceleration is rather primitive (although far superior to S3 Virge's).

@S3 Virge DX Acceleration

i had a S3 Virge DX (the ELSA Victory 3DX) back then which was bundled with the 3D-Updated version of Mechwarrior 2 iirc, it is true, this card HAS 3D Acceleration (also runs some 3D-Only Benchmarks) but the best fps i could ever get in any 3D game was something like 18fps 😲

+ET4000 had a VLB version. I had it on my old Hercules Dynamite Power VLB. It was an ET4000/W32p (faster version of ET4000). It was very fast for DOS and good for Windows. It interleaved its RAM for extra speed. Good VESA support, but would need univbe for VESA 2.0. Only VESA 1.2 in hardware.

+Rendition Verite. This was actually the first good 3D game accelerator. It's an all-in-one chip with 2D, 3D, and video acceleration. The core is based upon a RISC CPU. The 2D is pretty bad though, except for SVGA VESA modes which are accelerated by its RISC core and extremely fast. DOS low-res is horribly slow. Doom will run very, very bad even on a Pentium. Windows GUI isn't too quick either. But it gets the job done and you can see the first credible 3D accelerated game, VQuake. V1000 supports D3D and OpenGL. V2100/2200 is 2nd gen and a lot faster. Can run Quake 2. They got squashed by 3dfx Voodoo's far superior pixel fillrate. I have a Sierra Screamin 3D (V1000) and Hercules Thriller 3D (V2200) at home. Interesting cards.

+S3 Vision and Trio series are good too for DOS. I wouldn't go out of my way for a S3 Vision chip though. Actually, I wouldn't go out of my way for anything made by S3.

+Trident 8900C is a piece of shit. 😀 I had an ISA version of the thing in my original 486-50. It was so horribly slow, and it lacks GUI acceleration. I updgraded to a Diamond Speedstar Pro ISA (CL GD5426) which was a lot faster.

+Matrox Mystique/Millenium - Very, very fast for DOS and Windows back in the day. These cards are totally out of the league of most others. The Milleniums were incredibly expensive and used WRAM which is a dual-ported RAM like VRAM, but faster. They had Matrox' phenomenal 2D output signal quality which is just so amazingly better than basically every other card out in those days. I am not BS'ing here. Compared to your average cheaply implemented Virge, these things are just so crispy clear as to make you cry with joy 😀. They are very compatible with DOS games and are still credible Windows 2D cards today. Mystique is a low-cost Millenium. Different chip and cheaper RAM. Hard to tell the difference in performance really. Chips: Mystique, Mystique 220, Millenium, Millenium II. A G200 may also make a good DOS card.

+Number Nine - Good GUI chips but usually quite poor in DOS. In fact the Imagine 128 uses a seperate graphics chip for DOS! My Imagine 128 has a Cirrus Logic 5424 on the back with 256K RAM I believe. The Imagine chip kicks in in Windows and is very fast there. Signal quality approaches Matrox.

+3dfx Voodoo3/Banshee. This thing has an awesome 2D core. They built a super-fast 128-bit VGA core and a 2D GUI engine that puts everyone else on this list to shame (except a Matrox G400). I'm not sure about the VESA capabilities, but I'm sure it has at least VESA2.0 in hardware. Not to mention it has very credible D3D, OpenGL, and Glide! Voodoo3 is just a uprated Banshee core with more 3D capability and probably some bugfixes. And the signal quality is basically at Matrox's level. You can even run one of these on a 486 PCI board in Win9x if you use the 1.05 official drivers or earlier. 😎

Dont screw around. If you are building a retrorig today, buy a Matrox Millenium II or G200, or a 3dfx Voodoo3/Banshee. For really old games (<1992) I'd recommend a ET4000 based board I suppose. Actually for really old DOS games you are far better off just using DOSBOX to save yourself the massive time investment and compatibility joys of old systems.

I don't know about the SiS 6326..... I have one at home and man is it slow for a 2D GUI chip from 1997 or so... maybe it rocks for DOS but I've never used it for that.

#sis 6326, I had this card for a little time, it was very cheap. It broke down after playing halflife in opengl/direct3d for some weeks. overheated or something. no complaints on dos compatibility.

Got a #trident image 9750 as replacement, was a bit slower if I recall correctly. no complaints on dos compatibility.

Before that I owned some #S3 trio/virge cards, nothing fancy.

tried the #s3 savage 4, #ati 9200 and 9600. and returned them at once when I noticed my DOS games not running or having a messed up screen.

Since I always bought AGP ASUS Cards with Nvidia chipsets:
#Tnt2 Magic and Combat,
#Geforce 2 ti.
suprising dos compatibility, although univesa sometimes complained
there was always a way to get each game running fine and smooth.
Though started to get irritated by their cooling Fans dying/ getting noisy.
So since I buy Asus/nvidia fanless cards only:
#Geforce 2 mx
#Geforce mx440
got two mx440's now 64MB, and people might say such cards are slow, but I did not buy them for top-notch speed, they run everything reliable and silent,including all my DOS games, and did not cost me a lot of money.

If I would ever feel like an upgrade I'd try this one:
#gigabyte nvidia 6600 agp silentpipe

Radeons have poor VESA support. It's there, but it will frequently lock up or not work at all. As far as I know this includes everything from the original Radeon 256 thru the X850XT PE.

ATI wasn't exactly known for vast compatibility with their old DOS products either.

I don't know about NV's cards.

Are you sure it's not the other way around? I have had just problems with VESA and nVIDIA... 😕 😕 😕

I remember blowing out a montior by trying to play Bethesda's Terminator: Skynet shooter in 640x480 VESA on my nVidia TNT1.

HunterZ wrote:

I remember blowing out a montior by trying to play Bethesda's Terminator: Skynet shooter in 640x480 VESA on my nVidia TNT1.

😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳 😳

Are you sure it's not the other way around? I have had just problems with VESA and nVIDIA...

Concerning the cards specified in my post, I am very certain nvidia did a better job on VESA stuff, up until mx440/geforce2 at least. I did not mix up any card types in that post. I have not tried any later nvidia cards - Vesa will only get lower priority/attention over the years - Also I have the faint idea that it ain't just the chipset that counts, but also the card manufacturer (specific BIOS software)?

Sorry to necro-spam an old thread, but I think this is somewhat on-topic:

I was cleaning out my parents' garage yesterday (my dad died a year and a half ago and my mom is going to sell the house), and I salvaged a couple of cool video cards:
- Paradise SVGA. My first SVGA video card (ISA). Actually I may have junked it because it's pretty useless. I see there are 8-bit and 16-bit variants, and I don't remember which I have: http://82.114.193.227/vga/image/sbirka/wd/pvga1a-jkf.jpg (8-bit), http://www.hardwarehistory.com/images/oldhard … dise-pvga1a.jpg (16-bit)
- Tseng ET4000 (EX?). I had no idea we had one of those! I was like "holy crap, I have to post about this on VOGONS!" (so here I am 😉). It is indeed ISA (although Google image search also shows a PCI variant), and will be used if I ever build a pre-PCI box for classic PC gaming. I think this is what it looks like: http://www.3dchip.de/Grafikkartenmodds/Grafix … seng-et4000.jpg
- Diamond Stealth 3D 3000. It's PCI, with some kind of memory add-on board bolted on. I plan to keep this as a backup PCI video card, unless I research it and find out it's crap. It might be good for a pre-AGP DOS machine. Info: http://shop.vendio.com/LordMikal/item/6291686 … 0/?s=1128680048#

I already have an AGP 3dfx Voodoo Banshee and AGP nVidia Geforce2 MX laying around as backup AGP cards (and currently my mom's computer has an AGP nVidia TNT2 in it, I believe). I should probably put the GF2MX in my mom's computer and throw out the TNT2; or, I could put the Banshee in and try to play some Glide games on it (PII-450, 512MB RAM, Win98SE).

The more I mess with my Voodoo3 PCI the more I think it may be the ultimate DOS game card. It has a 128-bit VGA core, which is the only one that exists as far as I know. It is far faster than a Millenium II in Windows. Actually it's Windows GUI speed is transparent in comparison with a Radeon 9700. 3dfx wasn't messing around when they built this 2D core.

It scores as fastest possible in Wing Commander 3 on a PPro233. It's display quality is absolutely impeccable. The only issue with it is that Voodoo 3 cards get REALLY hot. Although I suppose they are designed with that in mind.

Here is a link to info on the 3dfx Banshee chip, which is almost identical to Voodoo3. Voodoo3 simply has more 3D capability with (it's SLI Voodoo2 on a chip basically)