No the Banshee is pretty good. Almost all games from this era support Glide. The savage4 might be more powerful, but if you want something more powerful without Glide a geforce4 mx440 would destroy them both. A voodoo3 might be worth considering though...

The Savage4 LT is an 8MB card with slower clocks? I think the Banshee beats it. A Savage4 does give you some new features like true 32-bit rendering, S3 texture compression (S3TC) and the Metal API. Only the Metal API is unique to S3. I would consider the games you want to play to see if those features make sense or are something you want to try. 2D core wise it's also close, with the Banshee being faster and the Savage4 being more compatible.

Yes the LT is the Low Clock Version.
i would not go for it 😀 better keep the Banshee.

Rawit wrote on 2020-06-05, 06:58:

2D core wise it's also close, with the Banshee being faster and the Savage4 being more compatible.

I removed the Savage4 from one of my Win9x builds because it lacked good 2D compatibility. One thing that I could not tolerate was that the Savage4 failed to open any VESA mode after shutting down Win9x into DOS mode. It would just show a mess of pixels in that case. It would only work when booting into MS-DOS directly without having had Win9x started before.

I have S3 Savage 4 Pro and Savage 4 Extreme. Very good cards for DOS but Windows drivers are royally screwed up.

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-05, 08:01:

Rawit wrote on 2020-06-05, 06:58:

2D core wise it's also close, with the Banshee being faster and the Savage4 being more compatible.

the Savage4 failed to open any VESA mode after shutting down Win9x into DOS mode

Probably the result of the crappy drivers as mentioned by ShovelKnight. You could try S3VBEFIX is you ever decide to give the Savage4 a go again.

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-05, 08:01:

Rawit wrote on 2020-06-05, 06:58:

2D core wise it's also close, with the Banshee being faster and the Savage4 being more compatible.

I removed the Savage4 from one of my Win9x builds because it lacked good 2D compatibility. One thing that I could not tolerate was that the Savage4 failed to open any VESA mode after shutting down Win9x into DOS mode. It would just show a mess of pixels in that case. It would only work when booting into MS-DOS directly without having had Win9x started before.

i don`t have this Problem and i own several Savage Variants.
But there several Drivers, i also noticed that the Latest Driver not always is the best.

I had stable experience on some cards only with the ES Driver:

I really like the savage4 because it's a DX6 capable chip and still got win3x drivers.
I am currently testing my savage4-cards in some circumstances.

I some cases the s4 seems to be completely different from what I have tested so far.

Good:
- win3x/os2/linux drivers
- really great image quality (sharp & great colors)
- smooth scrolling in jazz2-titles in hardware-mode! great!
- special support in REVIL2 (blood-color)

Bad:
- early games from EA don't recognize the savage4 directly (3ddata), ) => "unkown D3D device1"
- some glitches in D3D games (flickering textures in HOTD2/REVIL2)
- ...

Strange:
- lighting in HOTD2 (the only card that shows the intro dimmed in background,)
- ...

...more to come, I test the driver linked above this weekend.

Thx
Doc

I really like the savage4 because it's a DX7 capable chip

No.

Sorry DX6! you are right, but the latest drivers are dx7 as I read.