Sounds cool, but what will be the exact advantages of using your driver instead of official?

S3 stuff has good original drivers. At least the 2D stuff. So also like to know the point.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2026-08-15, 19:43:

S3 stuff has good original drivers. At least the 2D stuff. So also like to know the point.

2D stuff may be good, but the 3D part is questionable.

Yes you guys are correct, currently there is not much point using this driver over the native s3 driver, in-fact, the s3 driver is still more full-featured.

The reason I picked these cards to start with was that they are so well documented that it was easiest chipset to start with, not that I think I will be able to improve significantly on the native driver.

What I am hoping for long term is to add support for some chipsets that I can improve on or that are missing.

For example I am thinking of adding Intel iGPU GMA 950 or GMA 3100 support, these cards don't have native Windows 98 drivers at all. Also I am reviewing the ATi Rage Pro card as well.

So really this is just a proof of conscept at the moment but fun and hopefully leads somewhere more useful!

Wish I had a good driver for my S3 Trio32 VLB which let me change screen freq in win95

This being open source (even if LLM assisted) is a good enough point. There is this long post from 1998 about running GLQuake on a ViRGE (mirrored at https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/archive/s3.dimensio … /quakevirge.htm) and at the end is this:

...a fully textured, lit, polygon takes thousands of cycles of CPU time to setup. The something in particular was the question of the 3DNow! instruction set and the triangle setup time. An estimate from a source at S3 reckons the speed of the triangle setup would triple or so, with 3DNow! optimisations.

Perhaps now someone with an LLM could implement those 3DNow! optimisations, and maybe even SSE.

AncapDude wrote on 2026-08-16, 00:32:

Wish I had a good driver for my S3 Trio32 VLB which let me change screen freq in win95

I think I can add support in this driver for you.

If you can run this on the machine it will capture a bunch of information about the card first so I can start:
https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/rel … -v1/V9XSURV.EXE

More info: https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/rel … lease-survey-v1

jtchip wrote on 2026-08-16, 00:48:

This being open source (even if LLM assisted) is a good enough point. There is this long post from 1998 about running GLQuake on a ViRGE (mirrored at https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/archive/s3.dimensio … /quakevirge.htm) and at the end is this:

...a fully textured, lit, polygon takes thousands of cycles of CPU time to setup. The something in particular was the question of the 3DNow! instruction set and the triangle setup time. An estimate from a source at S3 reckons the speed of the triangle setup would triple or so, with 3DNow! optimisations.

Perhaps now someone with an LLM could implement those 3DNow! optimisations, and maybe even SSE.

Yep this is on my list in future (hopefully!).

informatyk wrote on 2026-08-15, 17:41:

Sounds cool, but what will be the exact advantages of using your driver instead of official?

The advantage of open source drivers is always, that you can change the behavior of them. So if you know a good optimization or feature from other drivers, you might be able to apply them.

I'm very excited, this is a great project. One reason is, that a reference driver for one family of graphics cards makes it much easier to write other drivers.

Lots of updates recently.

Version 0.3.5 - Rebuilt structure to better support multiple different GPU chipsets
Version 0.4 - Basic support for any card via VBE and dev work on ATi Mach64 VT2 and Rage Mobility-M
Version 0.4.1/0.4.2 - Fixed issues with 2MB S3 cards and working on real hardware - S3 Trio64. For some tests drivers are now faster than stock Windows 98 driver.

Two new releases.

0.4.3 - True colour support + bug fixes
0.4.4 - Now supports S3 Trio64 on VLB bus, tested on my 486DX/4 with Windows 95

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/rel … ases/tag/v0.4.4

Version 0.5.0 is now out, this includes large improvements to on generic VBE cards/support, primarily BIOS collection of supported resolutions, now you can drive up to 1080p on generic card if supported.