I'm pretty sure that under Windows your SpeedStar would be faster because it's a Windows accelerator card. Under DOS I agree with you (no difference), but under Windows the ET4000 is a decent card, but certainly not the fastest option...
I haven't played with the CL 5434 based cards yet, but from what I gather they are relatively easy to find and perform pretty well in windows at 16 bit colour.
I still suspect that Mach64 is a better card overall, but they tend to be much harder to get at a reasonable price. I have the ISA version with 4MB VRAM. It took me over a decade to lay my hands on one. Quite honestly, 2MB is all you really need. Anything over 1024x768x64k is going to be unusable on an ISA card.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
wrote:It took me over a decade to lay my hands on one.
😵
That's amazing...
Was it because of the price or availability (regardless of price)?
I wonder why nobody mentioned Mach32 and S3 928 cards so far...
hi 😀
wrote:I wonder why nobody mentioned Mach32 and S3 928 cards so far...
I didn't mention the S3 because as I was about to write about it
I realised that I probably always ran it at 800x600 😀
1026x768? that's a luxury for those NEC multisync things i keep
hearing about?
In related news I know why no one mentions the OAK tech ISA range because I can't even remember the chipset that old junk used.
BTW, thanks for reminding me, but I think i played doom on a 486
with an S3 928, 8MB ram and SB16 pnp that could only ever work
at 7.16Mhz or something like that and coming to think of it that
cache tester told me my board failed which suggests it was really
crap and moretec computers in northumberland park sold me
a load of crap. those were the days.
cya!
wrote:Yes the card is 2meg and you need 2meg to run 16bit colour at 1024x768, As far I can tell the Et4000 has no advantage over this card in any area, I benchmarked Doom, Quake, 3dbench and saw no difference in frame rate (on the 386), Nothing else would be worth benchmarking/testing I dont suppose.
yeah i think you are right, as you can see in the picture that the cirrus5434 chip was produced in 1995, while et4000 was released in around 1989. 🤣
wrote:I wonder why nobody mentioned Mach32 and S3 928 cards so far...
cause they are all late isa videocards, and undoubtly shadowed by that mach64 thing, if anyone is still buying high-end isa video cards when vesa and pci mainboards are popular. 🤣
wrote:wrote:I wonder why nobody mentioned Mach32 and S3 928 cards so far...
cause they are all late isa videocards, and undoubtly shadowed by that mach64 thing, if anyone is still buying high-end isa video cards when vesa and pci mainboards are popular. 🤣
That's part of the reason why late ISA cards can be hard to find sometimes and when you do find one, you usually end up paying a lot for it. When VL-Bus came out with more bandwith for video people started moving over to that and ISA video card sales started to slow down. VL-Bus was only around a short time, though, before PCI muscled it out and people pretty much stopped buying ISA video cards altogether at that point so the late comers never managed to sell in the numbers that earlier ISA cards did.
