It’s beyond the scope of this thread which is focused on period correct, but just out of interest, has anyone tried a PCI card like the Rage XL 8MB PCI or even one of those Chinese FX5500 PCI cards in a 486 or early Pentium?
GemCookie wrote on 2025-03-17, 22:36:byte_76 wrote on 2025-03-16, 16:36:Which graphics card is “the graphics card” to have for a late 486 to early Pentium machine for the best 3D performance?
Specifically referring to PCI graphics cards.
A Voodoo2, Voodoo3 or GeForce2 MX would work best. Benchmark scores for these cards (and several others) on a 486 can be found in this thread.
Thanks, I’ll have a look just out of interest but those cards are well beyond the goal here because they’re too new for period correct. In fact, they probably have more memory than the system 😀
chinny22 wrote on 2025-03-18, 01:16:Nah, not really, sorry
Our first PC had an onboard VLB Mach64. I still have that PC and use it often, the cards fine so have nothing against it but will admit not as sexy as the other choices listed here.
I have on Mach64 PCI and yeah, it is quite meh. Middle of the road performer and mediocre DOS compatibilty, which IMO is important for something like late 486 system or Pentium. That's why I prefer something like CirrusLogic 5446 or S3Trio64. Neither of those are exciting, but they do their job. Some S3 cards may have IQ issues, but that is not the fault of the chip.
However, Mach64 ISA is cool and I have one. It is a ridicilous chip for ISA card and so far I haven't found much use for it other than occasional testing, but it is one of those neat obscure little components that is nice to have in the bin.
Usually I tend to go for S3 when it comes to fast 486 to slow Pentium II kind of things. S3 is usually a great all rounder when it comes to DOS and Windows. If you need more 3D performance, add a Voodoo.
Best video card for late 486/early pentiums are the S3 Virge and Cirrus Logic GD54xx. Great speed, fantastic compatibility, easy to find, cheap. Anything else is nitpicking or compromise.
byte_76 wrote on 2025-03-18, 08:50:It’s beyond the scope of this thread which is focused on period correct, but just out of interest, has anyone tried a PCI card like the Rage XL 8MB PCI or even one of those Chinese FX5500 PCI cards in a 486 or early Pentium?
The PCI FX5200/5500 will not run in most 486 motheboards - same with some early socket 5 pentium boards. And even if they did, the driver overhead is so heavy that anything running with hardware acceleration would run like a powerpoint presentation. Haven't tried the Rage XL but I'd imagine it has the same issue (requiring PCI 2.0)
Socket3 wrote on 2025-03-18, 17:59:Best video card for late 486/early pentiums are the S3 Virge and Cirrus Logic GD54xx. Great speed, fantastic compatibility, easy to find, cheap. Anything else is nitpicking or compromise.
I would also add S3Trio64 cards on the list, but couldn’t agree more. Unless the aim is to build something really exotic just for the sake of it, there is really no reason to go somewhere else. These cards won’t get anyone amazeballs, that is for sure, but there is a reason why they sold like hot cakes back in the day: they did the job they were designed for admirably and were affordable. Because they sold millions of units and aren’t exotic they are also affordable and easy to find today and what worked well back in the day should be the same nowadays too.
Current prices of S3 Trio64 and its great DOS compatibility make it a great pick to have even if you're not going to build around it.
This card was always universal choice, like Trident TVGA9000 for ISA systems.
And it is actually an 2D accelerator, so regardless of DOS games not using it, it is great to have it on Windows on a 486/P54C to have smooth SVGA experience.
But there is another thing,
In my DOS PC which is pizzabox with only 3 slots, I dedicated one to a Stingray Pro card, while having Trident TGUI on board. Both have same 1MB, both are highly compliant for DOS games, Stingray is faster because it's one of the fastest PCI cards around, but Trident has Windows acceleration. So why did I decide to waste a slot?
Picture quality. There are many factors involving picture quality but this onboard solution sucks compared to Hercules. When talking cards that have bad output there may be some ailments to be applied, but onboard very much unlikely.
CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2025-03-18, 18:44:Socket3 wrote on 2025-03-18, 17:59:Best video card for late 486/early pentiums are the S3 Virge and Cirrus Logic GD54xx. Great speed, fantastic compatibility, easy to find, cheap. Anything else is nitpicking or compromise.
I would also add S3Trio64 cards on the list, but couldn’t agree more. Unless the aim is to build something really exotic just for the sake of it, there is really no reason to go somewhere else. These cards won’t get anyone amazeballs, that is for sure, but there is a reason why they sold like hot cakes back in the day: they did the job they were designed for admirably and were affordable. Because they sold millions of units and aren’t exotic they are also affordable and easy to find today and what worked well back in the day should be the same nowadays too.
Oddly my 5x86 came with an S3 Virge and an mpeg playback program
byte_76 wrote on 2025-03-17, 20:06:As you said, the S3 cards had good compatibility so it might actually be the best choice because it probably works properly with all games.
Try any game that exclusively uses 320x240x16-bit (Machine Hunter is an example I can immediately think of, but there's quite a few others from ~1997 which didn't have a 3D accelerator option) and you'll quickly learn that S3 cards are not good at handling that specific resolution/colour depth, especially with LCDs/capture cards.
GemCookie wrote on 2025-03-17, 22:36:A Voodoo2, Voodoo3 or GeForce2 MX would work best. Benchmark scores for these cards (and several others) on a 486 can be found in this thread.
This is objectively the only post that actually answered the initial question. In addition, S3 Savage4 cards are very well-optimised for high-end 486 systems. Revisiting high-end 486 3D accelerator testing and properly documenting it has been somewhat high on my to-do list (especially after I accumulated a test suite for Alliance AT3D compatibility), but I do recall Forsaken getting somewhere in the vicinity of 21-23 FPS with a Savage4 at default 640x480 settings. For some reason, my notes for that have disappeared so I don't know if that was done with a 160Mhz CPU at 4*40FSB or a 150Mhz CPU at 3*50FSB.
byte_76 wrote on 2025-03-18, 08:50:It’s beyond the scope of this thread which is focused on period correct, but just out of interest, has anyone tried a PCI card like the Rage XL 8MB PCI or even one of those Chinese FX5500 PCI cards in a 486 or early Pentium?
I have a PNY Geforce FX5200 card that does work with my SiS496/497 mobo (with regards to Linux, I have successfully got mainline Mesa to work with a Gentoo install that I experimented with at the end of 2022), but I haven't tried it with Win9x yet. I'm not sure if 45.23 drivers require Pentium instructions, I imagine someone else has already gone down that path.
Socket3 wrote on 2025-03-18, 17:59:Best video card for late 486/early pentiums are the S3 Virge and Cirrus Logic GD54xx. Great speed, fantastic compatibility, easy to find, cheap. Anything else is nitpicking or compromise.
No.
ARK2000 cards are faster.
If you don't need acceleration of any kind but just a pixel pusher ARK Logic is the best choice.
DEAT wrote on 2025-03-19, 23:50:In addition, S3 Savage4 cards are very well-optimised for high-end 486 systems.
Optimized would mean specially fit for purpose, and I assure you, S3 did not care about 486 when they developed Savage4.
The whole "high end" thing e.g. 486s running on 120 MHz+ on PCI boards is a footnote in computer history. I love the attention it gets today tho.
Literally nobody cared in latter 90s if their PCI card isn't running good on some niche "can't afford a Pentium" platform.
So if it runs well, it's not optimized but consequential. /nitpick
zb10948 wrote on 2025-03-21, 16:19:Literally nobody cared in latter 90s if their PCI card isn't running good on some niche "can't afford a Pentium" platform.
So if it runs well, it's not optimized but consequential. /nitpick
These "niche" platforms were incredibly common place and wide-spread in eastern europe back in the late 90's. PCI 486's particularly the AMD 586-133 outnumbered pentiums, cyrix 686's and k6-s 3 to 1 in my country back in 1997-1998, because they were affordable. From 1998-1999 super socket 7 became affordable and most of us got AMD K6 machines - not fast ones mind you, like K6-2 500 or K6-III 400 - but slow affordable models like 300-350MHz.
PCI 486's might be niche in the west but they were a staple of computing in the east. They are so common that back in the early to mid 2000's when looking for a second hand socket 3 motherboard you'd actually be hard pressed to find one without PCI. ISA only 486's were allmost OEM only over here and VLB boards were fantastically rare. In fact I did not see any VLB cards back in the day. I did see the odd VIP board (VESA, PCI, ISA) but no VLB addon cards - only ISA and PCI. I came across my first VLB card in the late 2000's in a computer I got from a friend who was into importing e-waste for recycling from western countries.
Socket3 wrote on 2025-03-21, 17:03:zb10948 wrote on 2025-03-21, 16:19:Literally nobody cared in latter 90s if their PCI card isn't running good on some niche "can't afford a Pentium" platform.
So if it runs well, it's not optimized but consequential. /nitpickThese "niche" platforms were incredibly common place and wide-spread in eastern europe back in the late 90's. PCI 486's particularly the AMD 586-133 outnumbered pentiums, cyrix 686's and k6-s 3 to 1 in my country back in 1997-1998, because they were affordable. From 1998-1999 super socket 7 became affordable and most of us got AMD K6 machines - not fast ones mind you, like K6-2 500 or K6-III 400 - but slow affordable models like 300-350MHz.
PCI 486's might be niche in the west but they were a staple of computing in the east. They are so common that back in the early to mid 2000's when looking for a second hand socket 3 motherboard you'd actually be hard pressed to find one without PCI. ISA only 486's were allmost OEM only over here and VLB boards were fantastically rare. In fact I did not see any VLB cards back in the day. I did see the odd VIP board (VESA, PCI, ISA) but no VLB addon cards - only ISA and PCI. I came across my first VLB card in the late 2000's in a computer I got from a friend who was into importing e-waste for recycling from western countries.
I am not from the West, I'm from Croatia which had war and recession from 1990-1998.
Before 1996 getting new computers was almost unheard of, as the country has just recovered from active wartime and being logistically split in half.
XTs, 286, and who was lucky back then, 386, what you had in 1990, was used as a workhorse for years.
486 belongs in that timeframe where wartime stopped its local adoption, and it was already a passe platform (at large) when our market recovered.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I worked in a repair shop back then, and had dozens of different friends/acquaintances into computers, nobody ran 486s for more than 2/3 years. Including the 'clones'.
Out of my 4-strong core bunch two of us went from 486 DX4 to P54C. The other two went Cyrix. In 1997. By 1999 we had Celerons and P2s.
zb10948 wrote on 2025-03-21, 18:33:I am not from the West, I'm from Croatia which had war and recession from 1990-1998. Before 1996 getting new computers was almos […]
Socket3 wrote on 2025-03-21, 17:03:zb10948 wrote on 2025-03-21, 16:19:Literally nobody cared in latter 90s if their PCI card isn't running good on some niche "can't afford a Pentium" platform.
So if it runs well, it's not optimized but consequential. /nitpickThese "niche" platforms were incredibly common place and wide-spread in eastern europe back in the late 90's. PCI 486's particularly the AMD 586-133 outnumbered pentiums, cyrix 686's and k6-s 3 to 1 in my country back in 1997-1998, because they were affordable. From 1998-1999 super socket 7 became affordable and most of us got AMD K6 machines - not fast ones mind you, like K6-2 500 or K6-III 400 - but slow affordable models like 300-350MHz.
PCI 486's might be niche in the west but they were a staple of computing in the east. They are so common that back in the early to mid 2000's when looking for a second hand socket 3 motherboard you'd actually be hard pressed to find one without PCI. ISA only 486's were allmost OEM only over here and VLB boards were fantastically rare. In fact I did not see any VLB cards back in the day. I did see the odd VIP board (VESA, PCI, ISA) but no VLB addon cards - only ISA and PCI. I came across my first VLB card in the late 2000's in a computer I got from a friend who was into importing e-waste for recycling from western countries.
I am not from the West, I'm from Croatia which had war and recession from 1990-1998.
Before 1996 getting new computers was almost unheard of, as the country has just recovered from active wartime and being logistically split in half.XTs, 286, and who was lucky back then, 386, what you had in 1990, was used as a workhorse for years.
486 belongs in that timeframe where wartime stopped its local adoption, and it was already a passe platform (at large) when our market recovered.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I worked in a repair shop back then, and had dozens of different friends/acquaintances into computers, nobody ran 486s for more than 2/3 years. Including the 'clones'.
Out of my 4-strong core bunch two of us went from 486 DX4 to P54C. The other two went Cyrix. In 1997. By 1999 we had Celerons and P2s.
In Romania things were different. Early machines (XT, 286) were very rare. Few people had access to computers in the late 80's early 90's. 486 PCs were quite common for this reason - usually boutique built beige boxes build way past the 486's moral expiration date. OEM boxes are rare, and were only used by large foreign corporations. Computers started popping up here in 1995-1996 (most schools got a computer lab in that time frame- usually populated with older cheaper 386-DX40's or 486-SX PCs built with budget parts. They became popular in 1999-2000 - these are the years when people started noticing computers. Some of us even had interned (dialup). Pine Tech, Lucky Star, Zida, ECS, PC-Chips and other budget manufacturers were prevalent in late socket 3 and socket 7 / super socket 7 form. I remember in 1999 Lucky Star / Lucky Tech sold most mainboards - 5MVP3 and the LS-486 - these were in every budget PC - or a P5MVP4 or 5S530 if you were unlucky.
Yeah things were massively different depending where you are, the world was not so globalized...
In 1990 my schools lab had networked diskless monochrome clone 286s running off a Novell 386 big tower that was under teacher's desk. Only when he flipped the switch, we got access to the games and stuff 😀 The lab remained so to about 1996 when it was replaced with all IBM 486 DXs. I remember those computers looked and ran great. We still had a bunch of faster 486s and even a Pentium 'build' kicking around for our informatics group usage and tinkering.
But most of computers in early 90s weren't PCs but leftover home computers from the 80s.
C64 was far most common but a lot of Amigas were around too. Those Amiga guys were gods.
But I guess our markets started being same-y at the end of the 90s, those Via Apollo boards were shit here back then too. State telecom had a huge effort to bring dialup to many homes and shipped a very shitty PC in the package. It was very aggressively marketed everywhere and brought swaths of noobs to the Internet, we despised it back then 😁 Nowadays it's a meme.
Btw. ARK2000 is the fastest period correct card. But when you compare price of S3 to it, it probably isn't worth it.
