After a few weeks with no time to even look at my vintage hardware, I managed to get a little bit in this evening. Quick benchmark of my Alaris Leopard (IBM486SLC2-66) board, specifically VGA performance of VLB vs ISA. This CPU only has a 16b external bus, so wanted to see how VLB performed.
3DMark2
UMC 85C418F 32.6
S3 928 VLB 31.4
CL 5424 VLB 31.4
WDC 90C31A ISA 25.2
Tseng ET4000AX ISA 25.2
UMC 85C408F ISA 23.3
Tseng ET3000AX ISA 15.6
Those ISA scores are identical to what I benched on my 5x86 VLB system, so clearly that's the bus being a bottleneck. The VLB scores - though better - are significantly lower, about 3/4 of what I benched on IIRC (can't find my figures now 😮 ). Of course the CPU is also running at 3/4 of the clock speed of the 5x86, but something tells me as this is DOS they were both just bottlenecking on the VLB.
Does once again show how nice the UMC 85C418F is for DOS, right up there with the ARK1000VL. It also has an interesting character set, looks slightly more like CGA/MDA/EGA than most VGA cards.
Now I still haven't though what to do with this little beauty of a system. So many options 😜