I have two Virge cards from Elsa and Miro. They are fast and have relatively sharp output, but something about their image always felt off. Nothing too obvious, but a lack of brightness and dull colors. I remembered this thread and how impressed I was by the comparison above, and I decided to make my own little test of the Virge's against a few other cards.
These are the contenders:
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Cirrus Logic CL-GD5440
S3 Virge (Miro)
S3 Virge (Elsa)
Trident TGUI9680
Control: Ennyah Geforce 4 TI 4200 (best VGA output quality of all my cards)
This is the scene for comparison:
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And here's how each card displayed it (click here for bigger version, Forum upload made it too small):
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The Elsa has the darkest image and the lowest color saturation. The Miro comes next with noticeably more vibrant colors, but it is still darker than the other cards. Both Virges have excellent sharpness however. Next comes the Cirrus Logic, it has a slighty softer image, but its higher brightness and saturation are immediately noticeable and make for a much more vibrant image. The Trident is even brighter than the Cirrus, but has less saturated colors and lower sharpness. The Geforce, as expected, is absolutely flawless.
I should note that the differences between the cards are more striking in person. The pictures are not screen captures, they were photographed off my LCD screen with a phone, and to a certain extent, the phone seems to try to compensate for the lack of brightness and colors. So the real difference is even bigger.
I'm glad that I did this test, and my suspicions were confirmed, even my name-brand Virge cards are crap. One thing to mention is that they are not generally poor quality, they have both sharper output than the Cirrus and Trident cards. It is just the brightness and color saturation that is off. The Trident card is very slow and has washed out colors, but even that I would prefer any day over the Virge cards with their dull picture.
Now of course, this test sample is way too small to draw a general conclusion, and you can still argue that the quality of the card matters more than its graphics chip. But there seem to be some recurring characteristics among the cards, for example, all Trident cards that I own are blurry with washed out colors, but they are exceptionally bright. And this dull picture problem seems to be common among S3 cards.