noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 04:07:

wd90c31: poor hicolor performance, bitblt suspected to be not working.

Somewhat false, but the WD90c31 is a strange beast - it has very strong screen-to-screen blitter performance, rectangle drawing and right-angle line drawing, but WD90c30/31 has the worst font rendering from any Windows 3.1 driver by a long shot for full-speed ISA cards, and it is poor at drawing lines that are not straight. Second best Wintach score on a 286.

wd90c33: too rare to find one.

None of the WD90c33 drivers work on a 286, and it is not compatible with Windows 3.1 256-colour drivers for the rest of WD90cxx - testing this further is low priority for me.

s3 911/924: quite rare, don't have yet, rumored to not work.

False, though S3 911/924 is limited to 640x480. Best WinTach score on a 286, but memory-to-screen blitter performance is both simultaneously good and bad.

et4000/w32i: quite rare, don't have yet, and it needs 2mb dram to enable interleaving. expected to work.

Pretty much the only card that is 286-compatible and performs exactly the same on both 256-colour and 15/16-bit colour modes - it performs exactly like an ET4000AX in 256-colour mode. Performs much better in 256-colour mode on a 386. Line drawing performance is poor, similar to Trident 8900D.

oak087: quite rare, found one but with generic 256color ramdac, not sure if swapping ramdac would enable hicolor support.

Has the second slowest screen-to-screen blitter performance out of all 15/16-bit colour cards I've tested on a 286 (only faster than Trident 8900D), memory-to-screen blitter performance is also weak but SRCCOPY is faster than S3 911/924.

@deat: I don't think he is interested in 286 usage 😉

ATi Mach64 ... you can configure the card with it's install program. Not sure what card do you have - DRAM or VRAM version. Also some have EEPROM for config others save the config file to the disk and load it at boot from autoexec.bat

Some chipsets missing from your list:

ATi Mach32 DRAM/VRAM
S3 801/805
Cirrus Logic 5420/22/24

kixs wrote on Yesterday, 07:13:

ATi Mach64 ... you can configure the card with it's install program. Not sure what card do you have - DRAM or VRAM version. Als […]
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ATi Mach64 ... you can configure the card with it's install program. Not sure what card do you have - DRAM or VRAM version. Also some have EEPROM for config others save the config file to the disk and load it at boot from autoexec.bat

Some chipsets missing from your list:
ATi Mach32 DRAM/VRAM
S3 801/805
Cirrus Logic 5420/22/24

my mach64 is 2md dram model, how can i config it?

mach32: i don't have one, expected to work well but not better than mach64, and rumored to have dos compatibility issues.
s3 801/805: don't have one either, but a fairly popular card expected to work well.
cirrus 5420/22/24: no bitblt, raw performance in hicolor is good though.

DEAT wrote on Yesterday, 06:34:

Somewhat false, but the WD90c31 is a strange beast - it has very strong screen-to-screen blitter performance, rectangle drawing and right-angle line drawing, but WD90c30/31 has the worst font rendering from any Windows 3.1 driver by a long shot for full-speed ISA cards, and it is poor at drawing lines that are not straight. Second best Wintach score on a 286.

the wd90c31's performance drop insanely in hicolor resolutions. in dos, its comparable to cirrus and et4000ax in 640*480*8bpp mode, all at maximum isa performance, but in 800*600*15/16bpp resolution its far slower. the trident8900d degrades even more though.
in windows98, wd90c31 with isa 0wait is about on par with a cirrus5429 LACKING ISA 0WAIT JUMPER in 640*480*8bpp resolution, and several times as fast as cirrus5422 and et4000ax that don't have bitblt. but in 800*600*15/16bpp resolution its far behind the 5429, only about on par with the 5422 and et4000ax, wintune score is a bit higher and wintach is even lower.

Get Mach64 drivers. There is install.exe for configuration of the card.

The Windows 95 driver for the WD90C31 doesn't seem to make use of the BitBLT engine at all.
I did use a WD90C33 briefly and it seemed pretty good all-around, but again was kneecapped by no BitBLT acceleration in the stock Windows 95 driver at least.

OTI-087 is completely unaccelerated save for a hardware mouse cursor sprite with the OTI-087X model. Also *huge* variance in implementations I suspect.
This chip is rare, but the majority of extant boards (which aren't many) seem to have only 16-bit wide memory instead of 32-bit wide, which will certainly choke performance.

Not many ISA cards actually accelerate high color/true color modes, it would seem.

Hey, I want in on the pick-the-guy's-post-apart game! 🤣

noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 04:07:

cirrus5434: a bit slower than mach64 but still quite fast, and isa 0wait mode makes up for that.

In Windows this chip is quite strong. It handled 800x600 256 color mode like it was made for it.
DOS performance was closer to the 32-bit GD542x family though, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to boot a GD542x out in favor of it if all you're going to do is play DOS games. *Maybe* unless you're going to do SVGA stuff (the GD543X has a 32-bit host interface).

noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 04:07:

cirrus5426/28/29: work decently.

I have yet to notice any meaningful difference between the 5426 and 5428. Maybe it'll show up in a program like WinTach but I kind of doubt it'll be significant.
The 5429 has slightly higher core and memory clock and memory mapped mode (which isn't always easy to get working right), but isn't a dramatic improvement over the 5426/8 in GUI acceleration otherwise.
Nonetheless the 542x family chips are my go-to for fast all-around ISA VGA stuff.

noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 04:07:

s3 928: waiting to be tested, not sure if card is functional.
s3 911/924: quite rare, don't have yet, rumored to not work.

The 928 should be similar to the 805 at any rate, except maybe a bit faster due to its dual ported VRAM.
911/924 were absolute slugs in DOS. Haven't tested their GUI acceleration.

noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 04:07:

et4000/w32i: quite rare, don't have yet, and it needs 2mb dram to enable interleaving. expected to work.

The ET4000/W32 series are memes, frankly. They also command unconscionable price tags.
I honestly don't think in 2026 that they're anywhere near worth their premiums.

noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 04:07:

headland216: this is ridiculous, cards with 1mb dram have 256color ramdac, and cards with hicolor ramdac have ram slots for 512kb max.

That's Video Seven for you. 😜 The masters of the unbalanced performing video chipsets.
They do seem to have some modest GUI acceleration and their DOS performance is very strong, about on par with a well-configured Trident 8900CL(note the L) or D.
VGA compatibility is okay except Jazz Jackrabbit has rather jittery horizontal scrolling.

Eep386 wrote on Yesterday, 13:49:

The Windows 95 driver for the WD90C31 doesn't seem to make use of the BitBLT engine at all.
I did use a WD90C33 briefly and it seemed pretty good all-around, but again was kneecapped by no BitBLT acceleration in the stock Windows 95 driver at least.

I think windows98 does. As said above, in 256color benchmarks the wd90c31 is several times as fast as et4000ax and cirrus5422.

It's possible they fixed that little issue with the 98 driver, but I haven't tested.

Not surprised to see the WD90C31 outperform the ET4000AX tbh. Newer chip, higher clocks (on average). No real reason not to.
Cirrus 5422 is a pretty old chip, your example was probably kneecapped by low clockspeed strappings as many extant 542x cards (even VLB!) are.

Eep386 wrote on Yesterday, 18:02:

Not surprised to see the WD90C31 outperform the ET4000AX tbh. Newer chip, higher clocks (on average). No real reason not to.
Cirrus 5422 is a pretty old chip, your example was probably kneecapped by low clockspeed strappings as many extant 542x cards (even VLB!) are.

in dos, where only bandwidth and no acceleration is involved, the three cards perform identically in 256 color vesa modes, but the wd90c31 falls behind in hicolor vesa modes.
in windows98, the WD90C31 is several times as fast as the 5424 and et4000ax in 256color modes, but falls back into same grade in hicolor modes. this makes me wonder if it accelerates hicolor modes at all.

noshutdown wrote on Yesterday, 10:25:

mach32: i don't have one, expected to work well but not better than mach64, and rumored to have dos compatibility issues.

ISA and VLB mach32 does not have full acceleration in Windows 98SE, PCI mach32 works fine - not surprising given that the PCI mach32 uses a different chip from ISA/VLB cards.