Hi... (First up, click on image for larger one 😉 )
I have made a kind of test and comparison of various MS-Dos VGA cards, people tend to bring up whenever the question "best card" are being asked for. And since I have some of the cards in my collection, I wanted to make investigate this on my own. I thought long about what the question "best dos card" would span over, and thought that numbers are great. What about price, and how they work in real situations?
I am going to focus on standard resolution in the games that I am going to play. No high resolution gaming. Going old school on this.

The machine I tested these cards on, are a Shuttle HOT-555a 3.2 motherboard with a Pentium-133 and 32mb Ram.

So I have done this thing of benchmarking the cards I have. Then looking at how much they cost and finally making a note on how they perform when launching some games.....

First up the benchmark numbers. This is both with UniVBE 6.7 running and without any UniVBE running (kind of "vanilla" card if you like)
Some of the numbers are marked as N/A, because the cards can not run 640x480 without UniVBE.
And the TNT2 is marked out, because UniVBE reports "No SuperVGA Chip Detected".

Now... Pricing.... (every price is in US Dollars)
I have written N/A in 5 places, regarding the TNT1. Because I can only find one single Diamond Viper V550 128bit PCI on eBay.
Mind, that these prices are eBay prices. And the cards will be found cheaper locally. I have gone for eBay purely because I was
thinking on those people that are new to this and/or have no local online sales place to turn to.

Real life experience....

Games tested:

- Civilization
- Dyna Blaster
- Doom-1 + 2
- Pinball Fantasies
- Epic Pinball
- Lotus "the ultimate challenge"
- Jazz Jackrabit
- Duke Nukem II
- Duke Nukem 3D

Both S3 cards, and the CL-5446 runs these games without problems. All three cards run smooth in native original old school standard resolution. The only issues that I have had, are some games require UniVBE loaded and some do not. Speedwise, this does not really matter. S3 cards are more bright and the contrast are more clear/clean compared to the 5446 card. The 5446 looks a bit more old school kind of, on a TFT monitor. Again... Speedwise, it does not matter at all, wich 3 cards are chosen for a retro build. It all comes down to preferance of the image quality, or how it looks if I put it this way.

The TNT1 card runs the stuff just as good as the other 3 cards, named before, and the TNT2 does the same.

Conclusion...
Well.... To me it does not really matter, because I have all of them. For others... That is up to each person to figure out.
My advice is to get the cheapest, because you will not feel any speed differences when gaming.
They all feel the same. So yeah... Get the cheapest unless you are turned on by pure benchmark numbers.
Another little thing to look after, are that a TNT2 lacks some specific technology, making it... Not really... Well...
Not really the best card for some games. As far as I remember, it is early 90's dos games that will have trouble.
So... Yeah... TNT2 for late Dos gaming.

The winner in my book are: CL-5445 for something like a 486 machine, because I like the image quality better than S3 cards. If I did not care for this, then it would be the Trio64v+ for a 486 that would have won. The TNT2-M64 wins, when going for high-res in high end Pentium-1/2 systems.

What do people say?

EDIT:
Well. Forgot to name the looser in my investigation. The looser is the Diamond Viper V550.
It looses big time, because of the pricetag. If you have one, then fine, then go for that.
The card it self is a wonderfull card. TV-Out, is 128 bit and all that. Just too darn expensive.