>= 2MB RAM enables memory performance benefits on some cards.

The VLB card to get is perhaps a S3 Trio64 based card. That is one of the most advanced GUI accelerators on VLB, and you get top DOS compatibility. Diamond made one if that matters to ya.

There aren't any VLB 3D cards that are of practical use for games. The only somewhat interesting one is the 3D Blaster VLB but they are extremely rare. It is unimpressive though because the 3D featureset is quite lacking and the 486 platform is just too slow for 3D games to run well. It is also only used by a handful of games that used Creative's API.

I did a bit of a VLB VGA card roundup recently on the cards I own, link below. In summary an S3 card is good, Tseng Labs I like a lot, Cirrus Logic & Paradise are also solid. I have a Mach64 but wasn't impressed, note that I'm only interested in their DOS performance though, not Windows.

The ultimate Ultima 7 machine

swaaye wrote:

the 486 platform is just too slow for 3D games to run well.

What about an nx586 motherboard with VL Bus slots? 😁

sliderider wrote:

swaaye wrote:

the 486 platform is just too slow for 3D games to run well.

What about an nx586 motherboard with VL Bus slots? 😁

NexGen chips didn't have an FPU so the game would have to use integer arithmetic to get good performance with an nx586.
But IIRC there were Pentium boards with VLB slots. (Uncommon and rather slow, though.)
Or you could use a POD.
But this is quite academical, the card is to rare anyway.

Cards with S3 chips and Tseng Labs are generally good choices 😀

I own the 3D Blaster VLB. It is too slow in almost all of the supported games on a 486, but with a Pentium Overdrive or AMD X5 133mhz CPU it gets more interesting. Definitely better FPS than with software. Short video of it here.

idspispopd wrote:

NexGen chips didn't have an FPU so the game would have to use integer arithmetic to get good performance with an nx586. But IIRC […]
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sliderider wrote:

swaaye wrote:

the 486 platform is just too slow for 3D games to run well.

What about an nx586 motherboard with VL Bus slots? 😁

NexGen chips didn't have an FPU so the game would have to use integer arithmetic to get good performance with an nx586.
But IIRC there were Pentium boards with VLB slots. (Uncommon and rather slow, though.)
Or you could use a POD.
But this is quite academical, the card is to rare anyway.

We're talking about relative to a 486 not a Pentium. Early 3D games didn't use a co-pro because most people didn't have one. A very few rare ones would use it if one was present, but it wasn't a requirement until Quake came along and everyone saw how much faster the games could run with an FPU.

sliderider wrote:

until Quake came along and everyone saw how much faster the games could run with an FPU.

Even with a FPU, fixed point arithmetic is faster. But more complex 3D games basically require some floating point in order to work well.

Quake is mostly an example of extremely Pentium optimized programming. Abrash, Carmack, et al wrote it specifically for the Pentium CPU and its superscalar UV pipelines and all its quirks.

What about the Power Weitek 9000? I know the Tseng chip is good but don't
remember hearing anything specifically good or bad about that one.

Weitek Power series was one of the early GUI coprocessors. It is a ~ 1993 chip that was fast for the time. Mainly a Windows 3.x accelerator. P9000 cards use a separate chip for DOS support. The original Diamond Viper was one of the more common cards using them.

http://books.google.com/books?id=7k7q-wS0t00C … 20p9000&f=false