Eep386 wrote on 2026-03-10, 15:29:

TGUI9400 and TVGA9200 are not very fast, but they're not horrible either. (Still miles ahead of the likes of P9000 VLB cards in DOS VGA performance.)

the weitek p9000 may be very slow in dos, but it was made to be a windows accelerator and would be fast that way, with no dos vga support at all. so it used either an oak087 or their own very old w5186 chip for basic vga support in dos, and equipped with only 8 bit 256kb dram, so no wonder why they are that slow in dos, but thats obviously not the p9000's fault.
still the tvga9200 and et4000ax are the overall slowest vesa cards that i can think of, can't think of something even slower yet.

Actually the P9000 is rather compromised outside of DOS performance. The blitter only works with 8bpp or lower, for starters. Unless collecting for historical reasons, I honestly don't recommend anyone go out of their way to get a P9000 as it's a very limited graphic card.

By 'vesa cards', do you mean VLB, or video chipsets that are supported by VESA Bios Extensions? If it's the latter, then I can name one immediately slower than both of those subtracting from each other: ET3000AX. Total slug.

Eep386 wrote on 2026-03-22, 13:41:

Actually the P9000 is rather compromised outside of DOS performance. The blitter only works with 8bpp or lower, for starters. Unless collecting for historical reasons, I honestly don't recommend anyone go out of their way to get a P9000 as it's a very limited graphic card.

that sounds bad, and probably makes p9000 the worst vesa accelerator. i have a wd90c31 which doesn't seem to accelerate hicolor modes, and the s3 911 and 924 are said to not accelerate hicolor either, but they are quite rare and i don't have them.

By 'vesa cards', do you mean VLB, or video chipsets that are supported by VESA Bios Extensions? If it's the latter, then I can name one immediately slower than both of those subtracting from each other: ET3000AX. Total slug.

i was refering to the vesa bus, which was also created by vesa.
the et3000ax is quite slow for an isa card and especially slow in doom which uses single byte transfer, but it has true 16bit isa bus, and faster than all those with 8 isa bus data pins in games with 16bit word transfer mode.

WD90C31 is a *very* competent ISA VGA chipset for Mode 13h, but its GUI acceleration is perfunctory at best. Even a Cirrus 5426 over ISA feels snappier in GUI.
AFAIK, the S3 924 is just a 24-bit aware version of the 911. It carries over the same sluggish VGA engine.

Kind of hilarious how drastic of an improvement the lowly 805 was over the 911/924, even in accelerated modes. Having a double-wide memory data bus would do that, I suppose.
I never was able to get my hands on an 928 for some reason or another so I cannot comment on that.

Eep386 wrote on 2026-03-29, 01:44:

AFAIK, the S3 924 is just a 24-bit aware version of the 911. It carries over the same sluggish VGA engine.

Kind of hilarious how drastic of an improvement the lowly 805 was over the 911/924, even in accelerated modes. Having a double-wide memory data bus would do that, I suppose.
I never was able to get my hands on an 928 for some reason or another so I cannot comment on that.

i have read some reviews that blamed the s3 911/924's less than ideal performance for having only 16bit vram bus, which i can't confirm personally as i don't have them or their datasheets.
if you have one, can you find out if they accelerate hicolor modes?

I was too disgusted with the 911's general lack of performance to want to hold onto mine back in the day, I'd happily test it out for you otherwise 🙁
The 911/924 also seem to have rather weak host interfaces on top of narrow VRAM buses. When a TVGA9000i outperforms your fancy accelerator in DOS games, you know your DOS performance is cooked 😅