There isn't that much difference between these video cards under DOS. And yes, the 486 is holding things back. But that's ok, in many situations you actually want a slow computers. Slow is king, it's easy just getting a fast Pentium 3.

The only reason for me to use an addon card instead of the onboard one was the following scenario:
In Privateer, you just arrived in a new navpoint (with all this swirling blue color around you) after a hyper jump and are surrounded by enemies.
In this situation, the framerate dropped significantly with the onboard card (and the W32p, too). The only card that could handle this situation without massively decreased frame rates was the Trio32.

All other games that I play run smoothly with the onboard card.

And yes, we run these machines to perform less calculations in the same time than we do today 😉