I have done some benchmarking (thanks to Phil for having them on his website) and I have come up some results.

The test machine is a 486/66 with VLB, 32 Mb RAM, DOS 6.22.

Here are the results for the Tseng - 2MB RAM all from factory (soldered on)

3d Bench - 47.6
3d Bench2 - 46.5
LM6.0 - 13284 chr/sec
PCPBench - 4.6 (640x400 8bpp)
Chris's bench - 31.3

Here are the results for the S3 (1Mb RAM, with 1 Mb expanded via 80ns chips from a 286 motherboard upgrade)

3d Bench - 50
3d Bench2 - 48.1
LM6.0 - 16661.89 chr/sec
PCPBench - could not load (even after UNIVBE - I can't make out the error, I don't speak German)
Chris's bench - 27.8

I'm wondering how much of an impact the 8 44256 chips have, as they are 20ns slower than the on-board RAM. Would it perform faster with quicker RAM?
Despite this, it is still the faster card, it seems.

Thoughts? Which one of these would you guys keep for gaming? Personally, I HATE S3 cards, I had a bad run in with them several times in the mid 90s when I worked at a computer store (PCI cards) - We always sold them much cheaper than ATI cards for some reason. Despite that, this VLB card is pretty neat, it has even a jumper for over 40MHz bus speeds.

Recommendations?

*edit - For the hell of it I ran the benches on some ISA cards I had kicking around:

Tseng 4000EX 1Mb ISA (upgraded from 512k)

3d Bench - 26.3
3d Bench2 - 25.7
LM6.0 - 2329.48 chr/sec
PCPBench - 3.1 (640x400 8bpp)
Chris's bench - 26.9
(not too bad for an ISA!)

Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 1Mb ISA

3d Bench - 26.3
3d Bench2 - 25.7
LM6.0 - 2329.48 chr/sec
PCPBench - Won't start (VESA Modus 1000 konnte nicht initialisiert werden!!! - I feel threatened somehow.)
Chris's bench - 26.9

Are the above two the same card? EXACT same results.

Trident 9000 512k ISA

3d Bench - 21.7
3d Bench2 - 21.3
LM6.0 - 1755.43 chr/sec
PCPBench - 2.9 (640x400 8bpp)
Chris's bench - 13.4
(goes right back into the 286)