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Looking for best Windows accelerator for 386sx

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First post, by Marco

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Gents,

I analyzed a lot of threads here and I still need your opinion.

As - is:
386sx 25 with wd90c30
Windows 95 and dos

Challenge:
I want to get the max out of above system for win95. Dos no problem as the graphic chip is one of the best.
I want to see how much of a difference a windows accelerator will make.
The benches I could find show more or less similar windows performance among most accelerators

Choices:
From pricing perspective: wd90c31
More expensive: CL GD5426

All S3 8xx cards are too expensive and suffer dos performance. ATI also too expensive.

I couldn’t really find any windows benchmarks for the wd90c31.

Question:
1. would you say go for the c31 ad it will make a difference in windows even on that system?
2. can you confirm an old statement here that the 2d performance of win nt4 is much faster (x5 to x10) as win 95?

Thanks a lot

1) VLSI SCAMP 311 | 386SX25@TI486SXLC2-50@63 | 16MB | CL-GD5428 | CT2830| SCC-1 | MT32 | WDC160GB/7200/8MB | Fast-SCSI AHA 1542CF + BlueSCSI v2/15k U320
2) SIS486 | 486DX/2 66(@80) | 32MB | TGUI9440 | LAPC-I

Reply 1 of 3, by mkarcher

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Marco wrote on 2022-10-29, 08:28:

2. can you confirm an old statement here that the 2d performance of win nt4 is much faster (x5 to x10) as win 95?

Generally said: No. There might be specific artificial benchmarks that result in a 10x speedup for a specific graphics card, but that's likely because the NT4 driver is better than the '95 driver.

There is some truth to the statement that Windows NT4 graphics is faster, though. But the point of reference in that comparison is not Windows 95, but Windows NT 3.x. In Windows NT 3.x, Microsoft tried to design the kernel to be small, inspired by microkernel systems. The graphics driver was running in user mode in a way that caused a lot of overhead. With Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft placed the graphics driver into kernel mode, so it could directly access the graphics hardware once the kernel had been entered, and no switch between kernel and a userspace graphics driver taks was required. There might be corner-case real-world scenarios where Windows NT 4.0 beats Windows NT 3.51 by x5 to x10, but even there, you don't get a general speed-up of this amount by just using NT 4.

Reply 2 of 3, by Marco

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Thanks for that clarification !

1) VLSI SCAMP 311 | 386SX25@TI486SXLC2-50@63 | 16MB | CL-GD5428 | CT2830| SCC-1 | MT32 | WDC160GB/7200/8MB | Fast-SCSI AHA 1542CF + BlueSCSI v2/15k U320
2) SIS486 | 486DX/2 66(@80) | 32MB | TGUI9440 | LAPC-I

Reply 3 of 3, by Marco

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Guys I found a benchmark on a Hungary page somewhere with a lot of windows benchmarks. Only for vlb but anyway.

https://bacsis-tuning.hu/2012/05/vesa-buszos- … kartyak-tesztje

So gd5426ff is absolutely to be preferred over the wd90c031.

1) VLSI SCAMP 311 | 386SX25@TI486SXLC2-50@63 | 16MB | CL-GD5428 | CT2830| SCC-1 | MT32 | WDC160GB/7200/8MB | Fast-SCSI AHA 1542CF + BlueSCSI v2/15k U320
2) SIS486 | 486DX/2 66(@80) | 32MB | TGUI9440 | LAPC-I

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