At which resolution and refresh rate have you experienced this issue? Does it change with different resolutions?

zami555 wrote on 2024-10-22, 09:11:

At which resolution and refresh rate have you experienced this issue? Does it change with different resolutions?

I get this immediately on startup. Haven't tried anything else as I was put off by this and it didn't occur to me to try other resolutions.

The brightness thing is a known issue with S3 cards from that era. The ones made by reputable manufacturers like Diamond, Hercules, STB, Elsa etc. usually don't have this problem, but many others do. In some cases, this can be fixed through software, or by swapping out the BIOS.

See this thread for more details: S3 AGP Cards (and possibly others) Too Bright

I'll stick the card in my win98 machine and see what happens when windows loads.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-10-22, 09:21:

The brightness thing is a known issue with S3 cards from that era. The ones made by reputable manufacturers like Diamond, Hercules, STB, Elsa etc. usually don't have this problem, but many others do. In some cases, this can be fixed through software, or by swapping out the BIOS.

See this thread for more details: S3 AGP Cards (and possibly others) Too Bright

@Joseph_Joestar thanks from my side for sharing the link to that topic. Till now I thought the issue with too bright display in DOS was related to just AGP cards from S3. Thanks to deeper study of linked topic I now understand that it could also affect PCI cards. Everyday a new knowledge 😀 .... just memory deteriorates faster with every New Year 😉 ....

Half-Saint wrote on 2024-10-22, 16:50:

I'll stick the card in my win98 machine and see what happens when windows loads.

Lighter issue does not go away by itself i think, I have one S3 Virge GX2.

marxveix wrote on 2024-10-22, 17:01:

Half-Saint wrote on 2024-10-22, 16:50:

I'll stick the card in my win98 machine and see what happens when windows loads.

Lighter issue does not go away by itself i think, I have one S3 Virge GX2.

Maybe not but I need to see what happens at higher resolutions. If the image remains squashed or not.

I just finished a quick test. The image appears washed out in DOS but not in Windows. The "letterbox" is also visible only on the first screen (see photos) but not on the next one where DOS begins to load. All in all very weird but I'd say the cards are not actually defective as such.

The resolutions of the two screens differ.

If the colours look good in windows where the driver programs the card, it could be a buggy video bios.

st31276a wrote on 2024-10-23, 10:39:

The resolutions of the two screens differ.

If the colours look good in windows where the driver programs the card, it could be a buggy video bios.

The colours look good but video quality leaves a lot to be desired 😁

A buggy video bios *and* a crap analogue circuit.

Sometimes there are RF chokes in the output path of these cards that can be shorted to pass more high frequencies, making the image sharper.