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2D Graphics Card Benchmark Recommendations

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First post, by 3lectr1c

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Hi y'all,

I'm working on benchmarking laptop video cards for my website (www.macdat.net). 3D cards are easy - 3DMark, although somewhat CPU-bound, should work well enough to give relative performance numbers between cards. What about older 2D cards though? I'm talking stuff from around 1992/93 through to final 2D cards like the ones from NeoMagic and Silicon Motion. What benchmarks are out there for this stuff? Are they all too cpu-bound to be useful at all to compare performance between video cards? I'm looking for something that will run on a slow 486, but also be new enough to give useful numbers for stuff from the late 90s.

Just looking for ideas and recommendations.

Owner of https://www.macdat.net, the largest vintage laptop documentation resource on the web!

Reply 1 of 9, by marxveix

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I have visited your site, only by searhing some ATi Rage drivers by looking what notebook had rage chip.

Dos Bencmark Pack
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html

Best ATi Rage3 drivers for 3DCIF / Direct3D / OpenGL / DVD : ATi RagePro drivers and software
30+MiniGL / OpenGL Win 9x dll files for all ATi Rage3 cards : Re: ATi RagePro OpenGL files

Reply 2 of 9, by Matth79

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Wintach, tests a mix of application profiles, Spreadsheet, Word processor etc, really leverages the bitblt function for scrolling, among other things. Numbers can get a bit crazy though, I think you can still get a readable result, but they can wrap or overlap the boxes for faster PCI cards
https://archive.org/details/win3_wintach
I don't think there are any DOS tests that push 2D acceleration. they are either straight framebuffer for 2D, or Glide / other 3D API

Reply 4 of 9, by Jo22

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For benchmarking GDI performance on Win32, there's Tom2D.
Re: Best PCI VGA card for Windows 3.11 performance?
Newer versions might be available in mean time.

For Win16 GDI, there's GetmanSoft WinSpeed V1.10.
Re: Best PCI VGA card for Windows 3.11 performance?

For Windows 2.0 and OS/2 1.x, there are the old PC Magazine Labs Permance Tests.
They predate WinBench/WinMark.
Re: Best PCI VGA card for Windows 3.11 performance?

On Windows 3.1x/9x, WinG Speed can measure performance of WinG.
The WinG engine was dropped in Windows 98SE, because functionality became part of regular GDI/WinDIB.
By installing WinG SDK, WinG can be made fully available to Windows 3.x/9x/NT.
Re: Best PCI VGA card for Windows 3.11 performance?

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 5 of 9, by 3lectr1c

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Looks like I've got a lot of great options to try, thanks guys!

Another thing worth noting: We can set "needs Windows 95" as a minimum requirement for the benchmark if that would mean that results from late 90s systems would be more accurate to their real-world performance as compared to early local bus stuff like the C&T 65540. I'll experiment around and see what works.

Owner of https://www.macdat.net, the largest vintage laptop documentation resource on the web!

Reply 6 of 9, by Ringding

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There was also a program called "Speedy" included with the Windows 95 drivers of the Hercules Dynamite 128/Video card that worked perfectly fine on 16 bit Windows. I will go look for it later.

Reply 7 of 9, by Ringding

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It’s here, under dynamite/win31/dyn128/install

Reply 8 of 9, by cyclone3d

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My thoughts ont this are that unless you have very similar laptops (same CPU and RAM) but with different video cards, the speed tests are only really going to be useful to compare the performance of different laptops.

His is why hardware review sites always use a set configuration for testing hardware.

They will only swap out the one piece of hardware that they are benchmarking while everything else stays the same... Except when they are comparing different platforms like Intel vs AMD, then everything will be the same except for the motherboard and CPU.

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Reply 9 of 9, by 3lectr1c

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cyclone3d wrote on 2026-01-07, 22:19:

My thoughts ont this are that unless you have very similar laptops (same CPU and RAM) but with different video cards, the speed tests are only really going to be useful to compare the performance of different laptops.

His is why hardware review sites always use a set configuration for testing hardware.

They will only swap out the one piece of hardware that they are benchmarking while everything else stays the same... Except when they are comparing different platforms like Intel vs AMD, then everything will be the same except for the motherboard and CPU.

That's the problem with benching laptops specifically, there's no good way of doing that. No modular video cards on laptops.

Owner of https://www.macdat.net, the largest vintage laptop documentation resource on the web!

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