I am surprised that Geforce 7 was that compatible but there are reason why the rest of us prefers to use older hardware as there is little question if there is support or not unlike modern hardware. I don't consider Geforce 7 era to be "ancient" 😀

Don't even bother with current gen cards as all the basic dos features are likely long long gone.

If the current gen cards still have the legacy VGA BIOS, they should have at least VBE 3.0 support. Its used by Microsoft's "Basic Display Adapter" in current versions of Windows still if you don't have a video driver installed.

Not to mention the recent graphical BIOSes use a 32bpp video mode for configuration, i'd imagine VBE would be needed for that.

Some recent cards actually don't have a VESA BIOS at all. They only deal with simple VGA (mostly for text mode), and higher resolutions are based on UEFI.

When buying my current-gen GPU, I had to search to make sure the brand I'm getting even boots if used without UEFI. And I guess that means even the same GPU varies by vendor. An MSI GTX970 for example might have a BIOS, a Gigabyte GTX970 might not. And worst, they don't tell you, and it's difficult to find information on the internet about this.

I experimented with a ThinkPad T450s with an Intel HD 5500 chip. It supports 256-color VESA modes in all resolutions (of course stretched horizontally because of the wide screen) and even supports continuous underline in mode mono. Now to find a video card that does the same.

FRACTINT is a good way to test VESA modes; it showed that the HD 5500 supports 256-color VESA modes, but not 16-color.

leileilol wrote:

Not to mention the recent graphical BIOSes use a 32bpp video mode for configuration, i'd imagine VBE would be needed for that.

No really. These BIOSes aren't even really BIOSes, but them are UEFI firmware images with a CSM UEFI module to provide basic BIOS support (akin to Coreboot and its payload executables). This is true since 2007-2008 for all Intel and AMD consumer based offers.

Graphical firmware tools use UEFI GOP 32bit video module drivers in all new platforms. For basic display in BIOS platforms them include some basic VBE, but as others say before, it is a crippled version, or sometimes even bugged.