Depends for what purpose...

But if you mean "the most powerful", in the ISA category I'm voting for:
- Miro Tiger 12 = TMS34020 TIGA GPU with 12 MB RAM + VGA chip with 256 KB RAM
- ATI Mach64 with 4 MB RAM

An S3 805 is a good option if you can find one.

For 2D windows acceleration, 3D acceleration, or fast in DOS...

Yes, for gaming and graphics ?
I want he best 486 computer.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-12-10, 12:54:

Yes, for gaming and graphics ?
I want he best 486 computer.

Best for graphics are not best for games. Best for DOS are not best for Win)))

Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430 nice chip. There ISA and VLB videocards based on it.

Most powerful ISA is the Spea FGA 860 Graphics subsystem. Two full size ISA Boards and adding the i860 to the TIGA chip.
Only suitable for professional graphics like CAD. For DOS games an Ati Mach 64, Elsa winner 1000 or ET4000 is more suitable.

For the best 486 computer I would choose a PCI based mobo, but I will stick to my EISA/VL combo board for now.

Here are my top tier VGA cards--- Tiga cards are fun and all, but they are their own sort of thing.

Best ISA VGA cards for Dos Games--

• ET4000AX & ET4000/W32i
• S3 928 & 805

Good ISA VGA cards for Dos Games --

• GD542x & GD543x
• ATi Mach 64
• WD90C31

Best ISA VGA cards for Windows--

• ATi Mach 64
• Cirrus Logic CL-GD543x

Good ISA VGA cards for Windows--

• S3 928 / 801 / 805
• Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428
• ATi Mach 32

Best VLB VGA cards for Dos Games--

• ET4000AX & ET4000/W32p
• S3 864 & 968

Good VLB VGA cards for Dos Games --

• GD542x & GD543x
• ATi Mach 64
• WD90C33
• ARK1000VL

Best VLB VGA cards for Windows--

• S3 864 & 968
• ATi Mach 64
• Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434

Very Good VLB VGA cards for Windows--

• Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429, & 30
• ET4000/W32p
• ATi Mach 32
• S3 805

Notes:

• ATi cards can by quirky on older DOS games
• Mach 32 has hardware 8514/a compatibility which can come in handy with programs where drivers are hard to find (think OS/2)

douglar wrote on 2025-12-10, 14:50:

Best ISA VGA cards for Dos Games-- […]
Show full quote

Best ISA VGA cards for Dos Games--

• ET4000AX & ET4000/W32i
• S3 928 & 805

Good ISA VGA cards for Dos Games --

• GD542x & GD543x
• WD90C31

This is a good shitpost.

Best ISA VGA cards for Windows-- […]
Show full quote

Best ISA VGA cards for Windows--

• Cirrus Logic CL-GD543x

Good ISA VGA cards for Windows--

• S3 928 / 801 / 805
• Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428
• ATi Mach 32

This can be largely interpreted as to whether you care about GDI blitter and WinG performance more than GDI polygon fills, line/rectangle drawing, font rendering etc. - in which case this is largely true. Cirrus Logic cards are relatively poor in all of those use cases compared to S3 and ATi cards, however. That said, the amount of games that rely on those for Win 3.1 are relatively low so it's probably not something worth caring too much about. I haven't benchmarked my recently acquired ISA WD90c33 card yet to see how that performs, but I was disappointed that it is incompatible with 286-compatible WD90c31 drivers - unaccelerated WD90cxx drivers do work fine, but you're not getting any useful performance out of them.

If you're talking about DirectDraw, that's a completely different story - on my to-do list is to make a list of games that explicitly use DirectDraw's ModeX (sub-640x480x256 modes) so I have enough data to confidentially say how overrated every single card on this list is.

ATi cards can by quirky on older DOS games

Any examples of that? I've never encountered that with any of my ISA ATi cards.

Mach 32 has hardware 8514/a compatibility which can come in handy with programs where drivers are hard to find (think OS/2)

This is true - you can play Moraff games and Mahjongg 8514/a (both of those work on a V20 with a mach32!) though the performance of the 8514 BGI driver for the Moraff games leaves a lot to be desired compared to using the ATi VGA Wonder driver. Linewars II also supports 8514/a (listed as ATi mach8 in the setup, but I'm 90% sure I tested my C&T F82C481 card with it and it worked) and S3 cards.

DEAT wrote on 2025-12-11, 22:12:

This is a good shitpost. […]
Show full quote

douglar wrote on 2025-12-10, 14:50:

Best ISA VGA cards for Dos Games-- […]
Show full quote

Best ISA VGA cards for Dos Games--

• ET4000AX & ET4000/W32i
• S3 928 & 805

Good ISA VGA cards for Dos Games --

• GD542x & GD543x
• WD90C31

This is a good shitpost.

Best ISA VGA cards for Windows-- […]
Show full quote

Best ISA VGA cards for Windows--

• Cirrus Logic CL-GD543x

Good ISA VGA cards for Windows--

• S3 928 / 801 / 805
• Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428
• ATi Mach 32

This can be largely interpreted as to whether you care about GDI blitter and WinG performance more than GDI polygon fills, line/rectangle drawing, font rendering etc. - in which case this is largely true. Cirrus Logic cards are relatively poor in all of those use cases compared to S3 and ATi cards, however. That said, the amount of games that rely on those for Win 3.1 are relatively low so it's probably not something worth caring too much about. I haven't benchmarked my recently acquired ISA WD90c33 card yet to see how that performs, but I was disappointed that it is incompatible with 286-compatible WD90c31 drivers - unaccelerated WD90cxx drivers do work fine, but you're not getting any useful performance out of them.

If you're talking about DirectDraw, that's a completely different story - on my to-do list is to make a list of games that explicitly use DirectDraw's ModeX (sub-640x480x256 modes) so I have enough data to confidentially say how overrated every single card on this list is.

ATi cards can by quirky on older DOS games

Any examples of that? I've never encountered that with any of my ISA ATi cards.

Mach 32 has hardware 8514/a compatibility which can come in handy with programs where drivers are hard to find (think OS/2)

This is true - you can play Moraff games and Mahjongg 8514/a (both of those work on a V20 with a mach32!) though the performance of the 8514 BGI driver for the Moraff games leaves a lot to be desired compared to using the ATi VGA Wonder driver. Linewars II also supports 8514/a (listed as ATi mach8 in the setup, but I'm 90% sure I tested my C&T F82C481 card with it and it worked) and S3 cards.

Sorry you didn't like my post, buddy. Maybe we are looking at different things?

ATI Mach64 (and Rage) has documented scrolling issues & black screen issues in the old games.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

For windows performance on ISA, I was just talking GDI and normal day to day stuff. With an ISA card, I'm happy if the GUI is just responsive. Never even thought about playing Windows games with an ISA back in the day. OK, I played Earthworm Jim for a minute before I upgraded to VLB.

The ISA cards with the Alpine series from Cirrus ( 543x chips) were pretty highly regarded back in the day, especially if you had 64bit memory working. It was up there with MGA Ultima and ATI Mach 64 if you were stuck in ISA. But the MGA Ultima is pretty much unobtainable at this point and had its share of dos incompatibilities.

https://books.google.com/books?id=7k7q-wS0t00C&pg=PA280

Once you get to VLB, there are a lot of options out there that were pretty good in Windows 95 for 2d stuff. Mach 64 and the S3 Trio64 were pretty hard to beat.

https://books.google.com/books?id=PITtFPwTaWwC&pg=PA287

douglar wrote on 2025-12-12, 02:00:

Sorry you didn't like my post, buddy. Maybe we are looking at different things?

All Tseng chipsets from ET4000 onwards are notorious for poor VGA compatibility due to the 256KB wraparound bug that is present in all cards:
Re: Which >256KB SVGA adapters forgot to implement the VGA address space wrapping after 256KB mark?

This bug manifested in several DOS games from ~1992-94 needing to have "VGA MODE 1" and "VGA MODE 2" options (or the "SVGA compatibility mode" in Keen 4-6 engine) to work around Tseng's ineptitude - games like Sink or Swim, Arnie 2, Yo! Joe! (which has a third "VGA MODE" for Trident cards, though I haven't tested it) and of course Keen 4-6. I wouldn't be surprised if I dug deeper I'd find several other examples from that time period. On top of that, I've come across ISA bus scaling issues with Tseng cards - I have a BIOS for an ET4000AX card where it starts glitching heavily at 12.5Mhz ISA bus and then completely bombs out at 16.67Mhz, and I have another BIOS where it seems to add wait states for >=12.5Mhz bus speeds to compensate for the issues when running at higher bus speeds. Finally, the ET4000/W32i has relatively poor unchained VGA performance compared to the WD90c31 and GD5429/GD5434. The Tseng cards do have Hercules emulation support, so that is good.

I can't speak for the S3 805 since I don't have an ISA 805, but my experience with the both my S3 928 cards (Diamond Stealth Pro and Number #9 GXE) is that like the ET4000/W32i, they have relatively poor unchained VGA performance (but good mode 13h performance) and they scale poorly with ISA bus speeds, neither of them can reach 12.5Mhz without bombing out. The 928 also does not have Hercules emulation support.

On the flipside, the WD90c31 has the absolute best CGA and EGA performance (at least when testing with FastDoom's benchmarks, but I've also run Windows 3.1 benchmarks on a 286 with the CGA and EGA drivers that also confirms that) and has Hercules emulation support that works relatively well, but both of my cards have visual glitches with mode 13h when running at 16.67Mhz ISA bus speed. The only actual issue I've seen with the WD90c31 is that for some weird reason on 286s there's a funny bug with VGA palette cycling, which manifests in the intro of Wolf3D with the deep black being a dark blue instead, and the blue and red values being swapped in Apocalypse Abyss for two examples I can immediately think of. My GD5429 and GD5434 cards are perfectly fine at 16.67Mhz bus speed with the GD5434 favouring unchained VGA modes over mode 13h compared to the GD5429, but they lack Hercules emulation support.

It's ironic that the GD5429 was the second ISA video card I purchased when getting back into retro computing after buying a Trident 9000i-3 because I thought "newer = better", and it is still my go-to for anything regarding 16-bit ISA for the past five years, with the VRAM mach32 being the best thing you can throw in a V20, followed by a GD5402 for a 8088.

Anyway, I have covered the performance of all of those cards in the past:
Re: Wow ISA BUS insanely overclocked and running DOOM at 35 FPS with an ISA ATI Mach32

ATI Mach64 (and Rage) has documented scrolling issues & black screen issues in the old games.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Ah right, good point with Gona's tests. There's no mach32 PCI tests though, I'll have to try that at some point.

DEAT wrote on 2025-12-12, 02:43:

It's ironic that the GD5429 was the second ISA video card I purchased when getting back into retro computing after buying a Trident 9000i-3 because I thought "newer = better", and it is still my go-to for anything regarding 16-bit ISA for the past five years, with the VRAM mach32 being the best thing you can throw in a V20, followed by a GD5402 for a 8088.

Fascinating... But I have a question for you: Why take the risk and overclock the entire ISA bus just for the graphics card? On my 386, I run an ISA CL-GD5429 (which is overkill) for (relatively) fast GDI acceleration in Windows 3.1. Next to my 386, I have my VLB 486 with a high end S3 83c864-P which is several times faster.

On a more practical level, I did notice that Cirrus Logic chips play nice with a very modern LCD that takes a VGA input where all my S3 cards will show "out of range".

mockingbird wrote on 2025-12-12, 03:34:

Fascinating... But I have a question for you: Why take the risk and overclock the entire ISA bus just for the graphics card? On my 386, I run an ISA CL-GD5429 (which is overkill) for (relatively) fast GDI acceleration in Windows 3.1. Next to my 386, I have my VLB 486 with a high end S3 83c864-P which is several times faster.

In normal usage I stick to around 10Mhz ISA bus and that's perfectly fine for me - the only exception is that I bump up the ISA bus to 12Mhz on my 286 Headland HT18 chipset motherboard to compensate for the lack of being able to change wait states.

If the main focus of your 386 PC is for Windows 3.1 games, then the GD5429 is perfectly fine.

On a more practical level, I did notice that Cirrus Logic chips play nice with a very modern LCD that takes a VGA input where all my S3 cards will show "out of range".

Oh yeah, this is another significant factor of Cirrus Logic cards over S3 cards - trying to get 320x240 high colour modes to work on LCD or OSSC output on S3 cards is an exercise in futility. I believe this was also an issue with ATI mach64-derived chipsets as well where it was stretching vertically by an absurd amount, but I could be wrong on that - the Win9x mach32 driver does not support low-resolution high colour modes for DirectDraw regardless if you use an ISA, VLB or PCI card.

That said, only a small number of Win9x drivers for ISA chipsets supports low-res high colour modes regardless of whether they are capable of running at 640x480 high colour - GD5424/6/8/9, GD5434, S3 911/924/801 and Tseng ET4000/W32i are the only ones capable of doing it. S3 928 cards have the capability of switching to low-res high colour, but it frequently crashes the system. I don't have an ISA mach64 to verify.

Well, maybe the ET4000AX, for some reason I have no data in my benchmarks on whether it's supported or not.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2025-12-10, 12:54:

I want he best 486 computer.

If your definition of best is the fastest, then you shouldn’t opt either ISA or VLB, but one of those late 486 boards with PCI. Decent PCI card absolutely trashes VLB offerings, and especially ISA in terms of performance.

You most likely also have the best chance of significant CPU OC with those later boards.

You can get a good experience with a good VLB motherboard & graphics card.

S3 Trio's are reasonably affordable, one of the fastest cards. Any Cirrus Logic VLB card is the best value for money.

There's one Tseng ET4000 W32 (VLB) card on ebay now for <$100 starter auction price. One of the best all-round cards. Fast for unaccelerated video.
Some Mach32's as well.

I don't think any VLB cards did MPEG hardware decode or 3D.

DEAT wrote on 2025-12-12, 05:34:

Oh yeah, this is another significant factor of Cirrus Logic cards over S3 cards - trying to get 320x240 high colour modes to work on LCD or OSSC output on S3 cards is an exercise in futility. I believe this was also an issue with ATI mach64-derived chipsets as well where it was stretching vertically by an absurd amount, but I could be wrong on that - the Win9x mach32 driver does not support low-resolution high colour modes for DirectDraw regardless if you use an ISA, VLB or PCI card.

Good to know!
How much faster is GDI acceleration with the VLB CL-GD5429 vs the VLB CL-GD5428 ("memory mapped I/O BitBLT" vs "enhanced BitBLT" -- per the datasheet)?

There are some tests here but he did not test the GD5428.

I may just put my Cirrus Logic card in the 486 afterall, because I don't intend to run Windows 3.1 at anything more than 256 colors.

MikeSG wrote on 2025-12-12, 14:54:

I don't think any VLB cards did MPEG hardware decode or 3D.

The Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM VLB (S3 Vision 968 chip) supports an MPEG decoder add-on as shown in this thread:

MPEG-1 decoder add-on board for [S3 Vision 968] Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM VLB

For 3D there is the extremely rare 3D Blaster VLB by Creative Labs, although that is a 3D-only card that uses a passthrough cable and game support is very limited:

Creative 3D Blaster VLB all supported games montage

MikeSG wrote on 2025-12-12, 14:54:

I don't think any VLB cards did MPEG hardware decode or 3D.

This guy is a beast--
https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/orch … ogy-kelvin-mpeg

Edit: I think I might gave gotten into a knife fight to win this card if it had come out in 1993--- But by the time 1995 rolled around, PCI is what people wanted.

For ISA, I believe the WD90C31 is the best performing one overall, i just found one in my stash i acquired so will be interested to try it out in my 386.
CL-GD5430, as others have mentioned is a very good chip too, available both for ISA and VLB

Fastest ISA for DOS: Cirrus Logic 5434 (probably best overall ISA chipset)
Fastest ISA for Win: ATi Mach64 VRAM

Fastest VLB for DOS: S3 Vision968
Fastest VLB for Win: S3 Vision968