I have a s3 trio64V2 and this video really helped, thanks for the links in the description. Now when using the pedestal thing to turn off the bad brightness , it felt really nice to be able to find a solution. Thanks Phil
Hehe, I paused the videos on shots of each card so I could try and make out the date codes on all the ICs, It's amazing to see how far we've come, this all feels like just yesterday :)
Back in the day, the first computer I built was a K6-233 with a PCI ATI Rage 4mb, then added a 4mb voodoo card. Such a wonderful computer at the time. I always looked down on the above cards with an air of superiority.
Wold be nice to see Matrox Millenium / Mystique, Millenium II / Mystique II included in these benchmarks. Also somekind of 3D benchmark that includes M3D or some other PoeweVR PCX2 chip.
i loved my dual m3d cards...was just fun stuff back in the day... a buddy wanted the cards so bad he bought me a tnt2 ultra for them and the 8mb videocard i used with them... hes still got them... in the best board for the combo of parts he used that was made..even though the total parts to do the "dream build of the era" was....more then a new ryzen 5 system....heh...
@@AshenTechDotCom Yeah. Matrox mystique was the way to back in the 90s. I had a multi monitor setup back when it blew peoples minds. The arrow goes from one monitor to the on beside it. The weird thing is I'm still a dev and actively programming but I rarely use two monitors. I have one 1440 curved monitor and i Split stuff. It's all good. My code line lengths have got ridiculous... :-) I never bought into the whole 80 chars a line bullshit. Luv and Peace.
Be interesting to see how the S3 ViRGE does in these tests. They had a vram version which I believe it is slow at low resolutions, but fast at high resolutions. Cheers!
Great review, Phil. Thanks! It might be worth mentioning that the 5446 only supports VBE 1.2, so it would need UniVBE to run games that require VBE2.0, like Quake in 640x480.
I've grown to love Cirrus Logic ever since I tried some of thier ISA cards , they seem to focus a lot on gaming performance and I am perfectly okay with that :)
This pretty much goes along with what we already know about these brands and how they have performed in their older iterations. Trident stuff has always sucked ass and should be avoided at all costs, while Cirrus Logic stuff has always been a great bang for the buck card.
In Slovakia, in Dubnica town we had distributor which offered Australian Legend graphic cards, very unusual in here. I think I still have somewhere Legend64 PCI with ARK chip. I've struggled several evenings to get running in Linux in 1996 (without internet). Still remember that ics5342 was the key in x configuration. I also remember that the distributior had a Legend128 card, which was very very fast 2D card.
I remember my first VGA card being a Tseng ET4000 around '93. It came, not uncommon for that time, with a programmers guide in the manual, enabling you to develop software. Unlike today where hardware is accompanied by a comic book manual ensuring the user plugging that usb cable using the right end ;-)
Nice round up :) Perhaps you could add in the future some benchmarks on 2D Windows (3.1 / 95 /98/XP ) performance? I'd be interested to see how the omnipresent S3 Virge did in dos games; I'd guess it should be close to the S3 Trio 64V+; I'd also be interested in what was at the time a rare an expensive card, the Number 9 Imagine 128 (and 128-II), along the Matrox Millennium. I don't remember seeing DOS benchmarks for them at the time. You do the best retro computing tests on youtube and possibly the whole universe Phil, keep them coming!
I was a Cirrus then S3 Trio64 user but among these 4 cards, only ET6000 was native VBE 2.0 compliant so I can guess right away ET6000 would be the best here. VBE 2.0 allowed you to play DOS Quake in higher resolution and less lagging, also improved Duke Nukem 3D and many other polygon games. Any way I've been using Scitech's UniVBE all the time with my Trio64 for VBE 2.0 LFB and I'd say Trio cards will shine in VBE2 LFB modes.
Just seen this one, and remembered the time when cards like this were spread out on tables and in the cheap bucket at computer fairs... if I'd bought them all and waited for retro to become cool, I'd be rich. I liked the Cirrus, my first PC had a 5428 VLB, my next (build) was Win98 with a 5446. Found a 5480 in a bargain bin, but it had bad RAM (next fair, mentioned it as being "pot luck" and the chap said, "pick another" - I got a Millenium 2 - good swap or not?). Worst miss, not picking up a £5 Voodoo 3, as I was about to retire my system with 3.3V AGP
I remember my first PC, 486 SX25 with simple 256 KB graphics card. And Upgrading that card to a huge TSENG ET4000 1 MB, was a huge improvement. Today, the S3 Virge/DX 4 MB is what I use in my "3in1 Retro PC" (Pentium, 133, 32 MB RAM). Nice graphics card.. Capable for all classic DOS and Win 95/98 up to around 1998. It has 3D acceleration, but for late 90s, you wan't to pair it with a 3DFx Voodoo Card.
It’s worth noting the S3 Vision cards prior to the Trio (ie 864, etc) were the same graphics core as the Trio, but had external RAMDAC, which is generally excellent and I’ve never seen one with a black level issue. The Trio, was as the name implies, a 2D core, FMV (accelerated motion video decoder) core, and a RAMDAC, combined. Some vision cards did not have an FMV core, such as the 864, and under windows that will cause choppy video playback on 486 processors. So basically a Vision 9xx card is the same thing as a Trio, but with guaranteed superior output, as the Trio was intended to be a cost-cutting product and found itself on mostly low-quality boards. All that said, the best card to get is a Virge. Most Virge models will be faster than a Vision/Trio64. And the Virge GX is a monster. However, they are also delegated to bottom-end boards, and can have display quality issues. Many I’ve come across needed recapping. However, interestingly, every integrated S3 Virge implementation I’ve ever seen had good output, likely due to the nature of the motherboard having more layers and being of superior quality to an addin board.
Wow I have no recall of how many times I have searched for something and end up watching a Phil's video. I just got gifted an older Cirrus logic GD5446BV 4mb. Seeing that other card I have more or less an idea of the potential this one has
I bought a few years ago the s3 trio64 v+, an aureal vortex2 sq and a voodoo3 together for 10€ from a local seller that was getting rid of "some old stuff". I've been using it ever since and it has been a very good card, no black level issues for me. Recently, I found an s3 trio64 v2/dx in an old pc, and I kept it. It wold be cool to make a comparison between the two, and to see which one is better.
In case anyone sees this. The great grandad of AMD video cards."Diamond" made the Speedstar and Stealth variants using the Cirrus Logic, and the S3 chips. I found the Diamond viper v330 based on the Riva128 good to if you can find the drivers, since Nvidia does not have them.
I seem to remember the ET6000 really shone in Windows. It had quite a lot of "linedraw" / "Flood fill" acceleration. Mind you, that was QUITE a few years ago now.
As always excellent review. I owned both the Cirrus Logic 5446 and ET6000 back in the day, and the one thing I do remember is that the Windows (3.1 and 9x) drivers for the Cirrus Logic was not that good, as it was a little buggy, while Tseng driver was faster and more reliable. But it has been a very long time since I ran either of these, and also I realize that this review is retro gaming focused, so your advice is spot on. I just know that when building my PCs back in the day, the ET6000 (even ET4000 though slower) was the better non 3D choice if you ran Windows and DOS, with the Matrox Millennium being the best if you could afford it. These ET6000 were what I teamed my Voodoo (I and II) cards with. Of course none of these are the best for Directx, or OpenGL. Thank you for all your hard work on these reviews, it brings back good memories. :)
My Pentium 200 MMX originally had an S3 virge DX, and in DOS games with the VESA driver loaded it did really well. I upgraded to a 3Dfx voodoo 3 2000 and DOS games just didn't look as good as with the S3 card. Now the 3Dfx blew the S3 away in 3D acceleration, but in DOS games the S3 just looked better.
The Cirrus Logic always performed and perfectly supported all the hardware video modes. I never found a DOS game that did not work. (I've tried over 1000 games)
Small fact: 64 bit chips run on half speed if the card has installed only one memory bank (usually 2MB), because the memory chips had 32bit path. Graphics chip memory controller use the memory interleaving technique to write double word value to both memory banks concurrently - one word to each bank.
You loaded the vesa bios to RAM for the Trio64. If DN calls vesa bios functions extensively the fastest access became tangible. I had an OEM Tseng ET6000 and I could also see some performance difference when I loaded brand (Diamond etc) BIOS to RAM. I can not recall the name of the tool. 24+ years ago in another galaxy.... :-D
Picked up a 233mmx and this video is very interesting. I am looking to get a 3d capable card but this was interesting as I currently have a Legend 64 1mg card of which Ive never heard of before! Quake and Duke3d work pretty well!
An awesome roundup as usual but the VBE you mentioned wasn't only useful for the S3-cards. Basically it was useful for every card especially when BIOSes were not meeting later VESA-standards or struggled with those. In the last days I used PCI-cards and even VLB-cards the VBE was one of my standard programs loaded. And if I remember right my Cardex ET4000-card had quite a good bump in performance using the VBE.
the 3rd one down, was in my first hardware attempt of of an upgrade. It was that pcb without the populated sockest, can´t remember the research. But end story short, got those chips and planted them on my moms 486sx Cyrix, and sweated for a couple of hours while she was at work to configurate those .sys files and that misterious himem.sys one on the starup and the dangerous BIOS hahhahaha. The next one was a voodoo 1 that had the same 2 sockects(or similar) and did the same but for an 8 to 16(or was it 4 to 6? or 8?...) meg upgrade. That was really hands on experiences for a 12 year old. With the 2d card/3d card patch through and all. That Tseng label later on, confused the hell out of me, with the configs of games etc....
Hi, Phil, Your videos recently inspired me to start work on an FPGA-based WaveTable synth. It's something that I've been wanting to do for years, but never got around to it. I did try about a year ago just to play some 8-bit audio samples in a simple drum machine style, but I never got that working fully. But, last week, I started again, and I've learned a lot about Verilog since the last time, and managed to get it working. ;) It's using an 8-bit sample set atm (the one from Amiga Doom / 64doom), so they were only sampled at 11,025 Hz as well, but it's not sounding too bad. By far the hardest part was figuring out how to implement the polyphony, and how to grab all the samples at once. That was a serious headache to debug. It can now do 32-voice polyphony though. Here's a clip of the Descent 2 theme, but with "fake" stereo (half of the voices assigned to each channel), and with some reverb added using Cool Edit Pro... drive.google.com/file/d/0B1grqFdAErsrbDJTM05lM1BPS0E/view And here's a funny screwed-up version from earlier, as I was trying to add the pitch bend... drive.google.com/file/d/0B1grqFdAErsrQUItQk5DbmRBQTA/view And finally, here's the Monkey Island theme, in mono, but also with reverb added after the recording... drive.google.com/file/d/0B1grqFdAErsrLVZXOFdSNzhBc1U/view It should be no problem at all to handle 22 KHz sample sets, and probably 44.1 / 48 KHz as well. I'm using the DE1 dev board though, so it's only using it's Flash chip in 8-bit mode. To use 16-bit samples would mean implementing SDRAM reading / writing, or grabbing one byte at a time from Flash (which is already a tad slow). I'm just working on adding proper SoundFont 2 support though. That will hopefully lead to adding things like XG support, and of course the MT-32 and AWE32 SoundFonts etc. :) Anyway, I've loved watching your vids (again) recently, and saw the MMX one last night. Keep up the good work. :)
Quite strange hearing the guitar solo in Descent 2 without the pitch bend, isn't it? lol btw, the whole synth core is using pure logic, so no CPU / MCU cores or anything like that. The MIDI files are being played by my external player though (based on the "MrMIDI 2" project online), but the MIDI input goes directly into an IO pin on the FPGA board, and then it just spits out the audio, and that's it. The latency must be VERY low, because it's grabbing the full set of 32 samples in only 66 clock cycles (at 24 MHz), so that only takes around 2.7 microseconds (whereas receiving a MIDI byte takes a whole 320us). The 32 sample outputs are updated faster than the highest note playback, so the output is running at around 93 KHz atm. The main limiting factor is the speed of the Flash chip (70ns), but I could still bump up the main clock to much higher rates, and probably manage to do 88 KHz samples etc. I had an AWE32 card in the 90s, and loved just listening to MIDIs all day, and messing with keyboards etc. I also used to repair and use many different "retro" machines, IBM XT / AT, and newer PCs, and of course fondly remember seeing games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake for the first time.
Oh wow, that sounds really cool! The Descent 2 track reminds of a mix between wavetable and an Amiga! If that makes sense. It does sound a bit raw around the edges, but very unique and fitting for an older retro gaming PC. Heck that's one cool project! I do have the Mist FPGA computer, so I know a bit about FPGA, and I think it's awesome. Man, keep working on it, this is one cool idea. Imagine a SF2 compatible board, maybe a wavetable board itself? Do keep me in the loop please about this one :D
PhilsComputerLab Thanks. ;) Yep, the synth does have a certain charm to it atm. I know it has that slight crackle too, but that's just where the sample update is clashing with the MIDI Note On stuff (if the MIDI state machine is currently accessing the ROM to grab the sample header, the audio update has to wait a few extra clocks for that to finish, hence the clicks). That will all be fixable of course, and I'll be testing a proper Soundfont later. Ahh, if you have a MiST board, then I can definitely get it running on that. ;) I don't have one myself, but I designed a "breakout" board for the BeMicro CV boards before, and I have most of the design done for a board that's essentially more of a MiST "clone". I've been holding off on getting that made though, as I realised that I may have the new-new HDMI board done in a few months, and that will have a similar spec to the MiST, and have the SDRAM etc., but on a tiny board of only around 55mm by 45mm. I also didn't really want to do a "clone" that would seem like somebody else's work tbh. Then again, the MiST is essentially generic (as with many FPGA boards), and at least they have made the sources available for all the cores now. I must try the Archimedes one soon. :p I will keep you updated on the synth, and may be sending you a file to test on the MiST if / when I get SDRAM support working. I may be able to load the Soundfonts into SDRAM without needing a CPU core at all though, as I already wrote a FAT32 / SD card core. Oh, and yes - one of the goals of the synth project will be to get some proper PCBs made for a WaveTable add-on board. ;) I just figured out the basics for the SF2 format last night. It's actually quite a simple format once I understood what the docs was on about when it was talking about the "chunks" in the file. Really, the SF2 is just a collection of simple headers, and then some other entries that relate to the patch info, and then point back to the offsets for the samples etc. Shouldn't take too long to implement. Only issue is that the Flash chip on the DE1 dev board is only being used in the 8-bit wide mode, so I'll have to do two accesses for each of the 16-bit sample values, or just get the SDRAM loading working. I haven't added the velocity, pitch bend, aftertouch, ADSR, nor any effects yet, but just hearing some 22KHz or 44.1KHz samples will be a massive improvement. I haven't had any issues with hanging notes yet, as there's no real possibility that it can miss any MIDI data. It's not even buffering the data in a FIFO as such yet, it just runs so fast that it can always process the MIDI data before the next byte even arrives.
Well if you ever release this and need support / a review let me know :D FPGA is cool, though SOC board computers like the Raspberry Pi / Orange Pi are getting more powerful also. The community already has FluidSynth as well as Munt running on the P2 and Pi 3 through a MIDI in. Something to keep in mind. I'm also playing around with that, but it's more to learn about the Pi, how to program the GPIO pins and basically just to learn something new :D
That's the thing - the reward for me is doing as much as possible in raw logic rather than using a Pi etc. It's not quite like "real" hardware on a Rasp Pi or SOC, because it's running a lot of stuff in software of course, and there's usually that underlying OS to get in the way. I do enjoy messing with the Rasp Pi and other SOC boards, and I expect the latency is just fine for most things, but writing the FPGA code from scratch means that I'll have complete control over every aspect (for the first time for a MIDI project). It will also have ultra-low latency, and can still (eventually) use large sample sets with high sample rates / bit depths etc. without loading down nor requiring a CPU. It's also easier to hook up things like other classic synth chips - the very proto board I have the MIDI signal hooked up to atm also has a socket for a YM2612 chip, for example. ;) I do a little bit of C coding, but Verilog and raw logic is somehow easier for me, and it's cool just to be making "real" hardware once the FPGA is configured. :p I'm thinking about building a full MIDI synth with a keyboard action etc. It's quite hard to find the decent actions at a reasonable price though. I've just been looking for some, but I want the type that has the proper switch bars under the keys, instead of the horrible rubber pads used on my current keyboards. I had a Cheetah MK7 MIDI keyboard in the 90s, and it was brilliant. It did have a few keys missing though, and a fault with the EPROM meant that it only worked about 10% of the time you powered it up. It's still one of the best I've tried though.
Still have Tseng Labs on my old pc Pentium 200 mmx, 128 mb ram and Tseng Labs ET6600 or ET 6300 i believe 4mb revision, cant remember anymore but oddly it could run 3d games nicely up to direct X 6
Just looking through a old box of stuff as i was thinking of building a 486 retro pc, i have every card in this test except the Tseng ET6000 lol, plus a couple of later S3 cars. Also found about 12 various cpus from 386 to 486, now just got to find a nice old case.
Trios and Virge's can be found for under 2 Euros very easily at least in the Baltics. Sometimes looking at local advert/sales websites for old hardware for under 10Euros can net you deals way better than anything on ebay as they are often sold as just "old pci videocard". Their sheer availability is an extremely nice thing. You can buy multiples of them and have spares/win the lottery on vga output. Cirrus however is just solid, the only potential issue could be availability
Four years later but if you somehow read this - I have a 'normal' Trio64 paired with a Monster 3D in my DOS rig (200MMX with 64MB RAM). Would it be worth upgrading it to a Trio64+ or Trio64V2? Am not sure how much of a performance bump it is between those cards and can't seem to find any info.
I used to have that same Trident PCI card back in the day. The PCI connector on this card was terrible. Any small vibrations or abrupt motion of the case caused the card to momentarily disconnect, freezing the entire system. I got a Millennium II shortly after and the problem went away.
I bought that Trident for $5 because I found those S3 Trios in too many PC's and got tired of it. It's nice to have something time correct and different.
For the trident card I upgraded its vram by pulling random dram chips off scrap electronics. You want 40 pin 256x16 bit DRAM chips. I got mine from an og xbox optical drive (that I bricked, still kicking myself for that...), and an old canon flatbed scanner that wouldn't work for some reason. If you have a load of old IDE optical drives laying around that you DON'T care about, check in them. You might find these ram chips.
I have a S3 Trio64v+ manufactured by STB, excellent build quality, has 2 MB soldered on. Also have the Trident TGUI9680, abit slower than the S3 Trio but very, very compatible with DOS games. The only bad thing is that it was manufactured by Union, maybe the worst card maker, the PCB looks and feel ultra cheap.
I junked my late 1997 PC for space reasons concluding nobody would have a use for it and it would be worth very little. Dosbox was at the point where it might serve as a replacement. Also I forgot how bad the control system of the old FPS games was. Sounds like there might be a market for the old stuff now. It felt like sacrilege to toss away a working vintage PC but I needed the space and had concluded my retro gaming experiments on it.
How do some of the newer 3D PCI cards handle? I have a socket 7 with a K6-2 400 in it. It has a Riva TNT2 Pro PCI in it right now. I'd love to see how the TNT2, Rage, Matrox, and S3 accelerators do in both 2D and 3D on non-Super Socket 7 systems under your tests.
S3 also had crap drivers (I had a Trio 64, followed by a S3 Virge). The S3 Virge replaced the Trio family and was one of the 1st graphics cards to support 3D acceleration, sadly it didn't have the grunt to run the features at a reasonable framerate, making the feature rather redundant (if you used the feature in most games, the framerate fell through the floor, although for the time it did look rather pretty!) 😁
I've got an S3 Trio64V+ and an ARK Logic ARK2000PV with memory sockets like the trident, but they're empty. What do I need to put in them to expand them properly?
GREAT review! But a little 4k driver being an issue for the S3 card? Good grief, that's what QEMM or even MemMaker is for. The S3 is clearly (overwhelmingly) the superior card for the money, while the TSENG only wins by basically splitting hairs. Also, the tseng is hideously overpriced compared to what you actually get out of it, especially if you can even find one with the memory still in it (good luck). For the best of all worlds with no problems, get an S3 Virge GX, which is the Trio64GX with 3D. That's a smokin' hot little video card, and you can find them for pennies (just bought one for $11US). And the best part of all? The S3 cards were the unofficial standard all developers aimed for, like how the soundblaster cards were the unofficial standard for audio. This means the S3 cards enjoy bulletproof compatibility.
Those 4KB of base memory spent on the VBE driver shouldn't be an issue, because very few games modern enough to run at 640x480 needs massive amounts of base memory. And having more than the required amount isn't going to speed things up, so it should be fine. I had an S3 Trio64V+ back in the day, and this never caused any issues for me. And with 2MB of video memory, it's likely you'll want to run 800x600 @ 32bit colour in Windows, which would be a bit faster on the S3 compared to the Cirrus if my memory serves me right.
How many dialects are there in Australia? I have noticed a regional difference like we have in the states. Southern draw, stubborn west coast pronounce everything like Siri to midwest talk with out using a nose …
ahh, I remember those VBE driver. since I don't have internet back then only to buy compilation of "pirated" softwares; then there were UNIVBE, really indeed improve my Winfast S3 with 1MB RAM. Never had S3VBE, sold the PC before internet era. I remember running unreal 1 for the first time on pentium 120Mhz with 32MB RAM & S3 1MB Winfast. Still only got a powerpoint slide show, but hey it's fully 3D in glorious 16 bit colors and you can see a reflection of yourself on the floor (jaw dropped back then).
nice video, it would be nice to have some feedback on compatibility with dos games, we all know during that time some games were a mess depending on what videocard you had, for example commander keen games were glitchy depending on the videocard, while trident was the low budget it offered pretty good compatibility. I owned a trident VLB card and i enjoyed it a lot playing games.
My take on DOS game compatibility is that people like to focus on the 0.1% of games that have issues and then declare what is or isn't a good DOS card 😅 For the 99.9% of games it really doesn't matter and they will look and play just fine.
There's little chance that you see this comment, but did you try out these cards with Windows? I have that Trident card, but when I try to use it with any version of Windows it glitches in a really interesting way. I think my card is just faulty somehow but I wondered if anyone else ran into an issue.
They can often be slower, as I recall (still have one about) the S3 Trio64-V2 and S3 ViRGE (3D/DX) will typically provide the best bang for your buck in terms of 2D Acceleration. VESA Vibe 1.3b or above is necessary for DOS Gaming, but as long as you have > 8MB System RAM and you load it into High Mem you won't run into any 'Edge' Cases where you don't have enough Base Mem. Specifically I recall this affecting games like X-Wing, F1GP, etc. still in terms of Windows 3.x (Win32GS) or Windows 95a/b/c (DirectX 5); you will see the S3 absolutely dominating performance wise even against 3D Accelerator Cards unless Memory is an issue. As I recall the All-in-Wonder was ATIs Solution to this, with arguable results. Personally I'd generally recommend an S3 ViRGE DX/2 + 3DFX Banshee. Now don't get me wrong the ViRGE was certainly a decent Budget 3D Card, but 3DFX was by far the best option available at the time in terms of Performance. This would usually be closely followed by Matrox Mystique or Power VR, assuming games actually supported them... which was the biggest problem for most competitors to 3DFX in the Mid-Late 90s. The same would be true for the RIVA TNT and NV-1. It is better to have consistent performance and support (IMO) than the odd gem that was designed specifically for said Card that provides Great FPS. There also was very little stock (at the time) placed on Benchmarks as it was quite well known that Developers would optimise the hell out of getting good Scores on common benchmark programs to give the illusion they were more awesome than they really were. Not much has really changed really.
Leyvin (StudioRaven) Riva TNT and NV-1: You could not get any more different in graphics chips if you tried. The NV-1 used Quadratic rendering as opposed to the triangles that every other graphics chip used. It really was only applicable in full strength to Sega Saturn and Sega arcade board-derived games, and in fact, the only PC card to use that chip provided ports to use Saturn controllers with. While they did make an OpenGL compatible driver, it was really hampered trying to translate between the two. The Riva TNT threw that out and went with the same triangle-based rendering all the other cards used (and still use), and was actually pretty well supported in the day before DirectX was released as middleware to both make a lot of that moot and put a nail in the Voodoo's coffin as Glide was not compatible with DirectX. With the increasing focus on Windows for gaming, specialized APIs like Glide became less important, but 3Dfx was slow to move on from Glide and suffered for it in the long run. Really, the window of Glide dominance was actually somewhat small in the grand scheme of things.
Cheapest way to get an ET6000 card is to search ebay for STB LIGHTSPEED 128 and you will find them for $15. Yes it is the 2MB version, but that is really plenty for dos gaming.
Hi Phil! :) Now I have some S3 graphics cards. Like the S3 Trio and S3 Virge/DX. Which one is faster? Do you know where I could get detailed info about the S3 cards? Thank you! I am using Google, but not much luck so far.
I have an S3 Velocity 3D that has 4MB RAM (non-RAMDAC) and a memory expansion that gives it 8MB RAM (RAMDAC), but certain software can see all 8MB RAM. Hell, the games that say "Pentium II recommended" run at great framerates in Windows 98SE and I get between 90 and 100FPS in DooM and that's on an AMD K6-2/300 CPU.
I have tried the CL and S3 head to head. In real gaming or actual use, I do not notice any difference as such. They are only really noticeable when benching. So my recommendation is to get the cheapest of them. On a P133 to P166, is does not matter, as the CPU is the definitive bottleneck. S3 has a clear and sharp image quality. The CL has more vibrant colours and generates a more "cozy" image quality. Price are to me, what makes me recommend the right card on an mid range Pentium one.
PhilsComputerLab If numbers are whats count.... Count. Numbers. Yeah. :-D (just joking). Anyway. to get real again. I tend to look at a lot of factors, when choosing the best card. One is naturally the benchmark numbers, there is the question on how will it look on a TFT monitor as I have seen some PCI cards make them vertical spaghetti Lines. Then there is the question: "Will it run smoothly"? And then finally the price. You went into these questions in you'r video too. So many people responding with benchmark numbers only, when asked about the best card of all. :-D Sorry for bad writing. I am on my phone that does what it just wants.
Thank you, it's really interesting video aside from money. It would be such a pleasure if run quake on your suggested pci card. Also I like to run a 2 x agp card intel 740 on a 2x supported mother board someday. ;)
IIRC, Tseng 6000 was one of higher end (expensive) vga card back in 1996 era; but one of the most expensive one was "Oxygen" card with 12MB memory, dunno if anyone ever bought or even heard about it. I just never seen them IRL, just price info from some very old computer catalogue when I get my very 1st PC. Oh, one more thing, my first PC was using Winfast 1MB VGA card (oh the memory), which uses S3 Virge chip. I'd say it was a good compatibility chip, but nothing special; some S3 cards would allow you to upgrade to 2MB memory for SXGA resolution.
Nice comparison, but I would have been interested in also learning your opinion regarding 2D video quality. I, for one, could certainly give up a few FPS for a sharper image. :)
For DOS, which is mostly 320x200, shouldn't matter much. Windows is a different story, here you could see differences. Matrox are the way to go for this...
Thanks for the fast reply, Phil. In my experience, DOS is also problematic. I have video cards that have exceptional 2D quality in 720 x 400 / 640 x 480 (Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3, Elsa GeForce 2 MX / GTS), others that were horrible but fixed them by removing the RFI filter (Asus V7700 GeForce 2 GTS, Inno3D GeForce 3 Ti 200), and some that seem to be unfixable (basically, all of my Riva TNT / TNT2 cards, Medion GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x, etc). Some are so blurry that even the text on the DOS command prompt is a pain to read.
@@ruxandy I see. I haven't noticed much, but admit that I haven't done much DOS stuff with Nvidia cards. I have old ISA cards and here I can see sort of stripes on LCD monitors.
@Dalle Smalhals never said that these were all the GPUs I owned. I also have ISA, VLB and PCI video cards from the DOS era. The cards I listed above were just as an example that even newer cards can suffer from poor image quality.
I had all of them except Tseng :) Oh and I had 2MB VRAM S3 805 on VLB :) Combined with MS DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 on an 486DX2/66. Actually maybe some comparision between speeds of VLB and PCI video cards?
I have an S3 Trio64UV+. Good enough? Only problem is that it'll only work with the miniport driver in Windows ME or NT4 driver in Win2000 which is kinda bad. I like playing Diablo on it and it worked well in 2000 once and now it just lags. In DOS however, it's awesome!
If you want one, yes, it's suppose to be the normal price for those cards. People give them usually (that's how I got my cirus logic to). They are not worth 45$. If you pay that price, you are juste helping the prices to go higher and helping greedy people that scavenge the parts for next to nothing.
i have found some socket 3 and socket 7 boards on ebay for reasonable prices, but many are really expensive like $120 all the way to $500, sound card and video cards of that era are getting pricey too, i guess out of greed or the parts getting rarer and rarer from recycling.
I just stick with my old graphics decelerator (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro) for DOS, since its useless for 3D games (which all run properly under Windows ME with my Voodoo 2 SLI)).
I'm also a bit curious how cards work in Windows NT 4.0 and 2000? I have a couple of retro DUAL-CPU computers that I need to get going. I suppose 3D cards are better suited for their power, but have you ever considered using an operating system other than Win98?
If you wanted 3D it was OpenGL or nothing with NT4 or 2000, and none of these chipsets supported OpenGL. IIRC you could get some limited Direct3D or Glide support in 2000 but most driver support was poor for gaming class 3D chipsets - drivers focused on Win98 at that time. Most people doing OpenGL work in NT4/2000 were dropping serious cash for things like FireGL boards.
It is interesting, what is the world slowest PCI video card? As we know the fastest one is Zotac GT610, in different situations also GT520 and GT430, i guess all are based on Nvidia Fermi chip. But what's the slowest? Maybe Trident?
I have a s3 trio64V2 and this video really helped, thanks for the links in the description. Now when using the pedestal thing to turn off the bad brightness , it felt really nice to be able to find a solution.
Thanks Phil
Hehe, I paused the videos on shots of each card so I could try and make out the date codes on all the ICs,
It's amazing to see how far we've come, this all feels like just yesterday :)
ha ha ha me to
I feel like the S3 got a little bit sadder looking when you told it that it disappointed you. :(
Poor little video card. It tried its best, Phil!
Back in the day, the first computer I built was a K6-233 with a PCI ATI Rage 4mb, then added a 4mb voodoo card.
Such a wonderful computer at the time. I always looked down on the above cards with an air of superiority.
Wold be nice to see Matrox Millenium / Mystique, Millenium II / Mystique II included in these benchmarks. Also somekind of 3D benchmark that includes M3D or some other PoeweVR PCX2 chip.
i loved my dual m3d cards...was just fun stuff back in the day... a buddy wanted the cards so bad he bought me a tnt2 ultra for them and the 8mb videocard i used with them... hes still got them... in the best board for the combo of parts he used that was made..even though the total parts to do the "dream build of the era" was....more then a new ryzen 5 system....heh...
@@AshenTechDotCom Yeah. Matrox mystique was the way to back in the 90s. I had a multi monitor setup back when it blew peoples minds.
The arrow goes from one monitor to the on beside it.
The weird thing is I'm still a dev and actively programming but I rarely use two monitors. I have one 1440 curved monitor and i Split stuff. It's all good.
My code line lengths have got ridiculous... :-)
I never bought into the whole 80 chars a line bullshit.
Luv and Peace.
Be interesting to see how the S3 ViRGE does in these tests. They had a vram version which I believe it is slow at low resolutions, but fast at high resolutions.
Cheers!
Great review, Phil. Thanks! It might be worth mentioning that the 5446 only supports VBE 1.2, so it would need UniVBE to run games that require VBE2.0, like Quake in 640x480.
I've grown to love Cirrus Logic ever since I tried some of thier ISA cards , they seem to focus a lot on gaming performance and I am perfectly okay with that :)
Agreed! They are really good cards.
HPZeta Cirrus Logic cards also tend to have better VGA DACs than most S3 cards.
@@lordmithras47 I know I'm forever behind in this conversation but man you are not kidding. My S3 has some pretty awful palletes
@@amberselectronics : Definitely, there was a lot of variability in quality from OEM to OEM. Generally, Diamond Multimedia's S3 cards were good.
This pretty much goes along with what we already know about these brands and how they have performed in their older iterations. Trident stuff has always sucked ass and should be avoided at all costs, while Cirrus Logic stuff has always been a great bang for the buck card.
In Slovakia, in Dubnica town we had distributor which offered Australian Legend graphic cards, very unusual in here. I think I still have somewhere Legend64 PCI with ARK chip. I've struggled several evenings to get running in Linux in 1996 (without internet). Still remember that ics5342 was the key in x configuration. I also remember that the distributior had a Legend128 card, which was very very fast 2D card.
I remember I have read the review on it in PCRevue magazine .
I remember my first VGA card being a Tseng ET4000 around '93. It came, not uncommon for that time, with a programmers guide in the manual, enabling you to develop software. Unlike today where hardware is accompanied by a comic book manual ensuring the user plugging that usb cable using the right end ;-)
So true :D
Nice round up :) Perhaps you could add in the future some benchmarks on 2D Windows (3.1 / 95 /98/XP ) performance? I'd be interested to see how the omnipresent S3 Virge did in dos games; I'd guess it should be close to the S3 Trio 64V+; I'd also be interested in what was at the time a rare an expensive card, the Number 9 Imagine 128 (and 128-II), along the Matrox Millennium. I don't remember seeing DOS benchmarks for them at the time. You do the best retro computing tests on youtube and possibly the whole universe Phil, keep them coming!
I was a Cirrus then S3 Trio64 user but among these 4 cards, only ET6000 was native VBE 2.0 compliant so I can guess right away ET6000 would be the best here. VBE 2.0 allowed you to play DOS Quake in higher resolution and less lagging, also improved Duke Nukem 3D and many other polygon games. Any way I've been using Scitech's UniVBE all the time with my Trio64 for VBE 2.0 LFB and I'd say Trio cards will shine in VBE2 LFB modes.
Just seen this one, and remembered the time when cards like this were spread out on tables and in the cheap bucket at computer fairs... if I'd bought them all and waited for retro to become cool, I'd be rich. I liked the Cirrus, my first PC had a 5428 VLB, my next (build) was Win98 with a 5446. Found a 5480 in a bargain bin, but it had bad RAM (next fair, mentioned it as being "pot luck" and the chap said, "pick another" - I got a Millenium 2 - good swap or not?).
Worst miss, not picking up a £5 Voodoo 3, as I was about to retire my system with 3.3V AGP
I remember my first PC, 486 SX25 with simple 256 KB graphics card. And Upgrading that card to a huge TSENG ET4000 1 MB, was a huge improvement.
Today, the S3 Virge/DX 4 MB is what I use in my "3in1 Retro PC" (Pentium, 133, 32 MB RAM). Nice graphics card.. Capable for all classic DOS and Win 95/98 up to around 1998. It has 3D acceleration, but for late 90s, you wan't to pair it with a 3DFx Voodoo Card.
Cirrus logic damn the memories, these were usually embedded in to the motherboard
It’s worth noting the S3 Vision cards prior to the Trio (ie 864, etc) were the same graphics core as the Trio, but had external RAMDAC, which is generally excellent and I’ve never seen one with a black level issue. The Trio, was as the name implies, a 2D core, FMV (accelerated motion video decoder) core, and a RAMDAC, combined. Some vision cards did not have an FMV core, such as the 864, and under windows that will cause choppy video playback on 486 processors. So basically a Vision 9xx card is the same thing as a Trio, but with guaranteed superior output, as the Trio was intended to be a cost-cutting product and found itself on mostly low-quality boards.
All that said, the best card to get is a Virge. Most Virge models will be faster than a Vision/Trio64. And the Virge GX is a monster. However, they are also delegated to bottom-end boards, and can have display quality issues. Many I’ve come across needed recapping. However, interestingly, every integrated S3 Virge implementation I’ve ever seen had good output, likely due to the nature of the motherboard having more layers and being of superior quality to an addin board.
I love learning of such details, thank you for sharing! 🙂
Trident 9680 with 4mb vram, it was THE card for DOS. Oh, the memories!
I bought the TSENG6000 today with full memories in the flea market for a dollar and a half
No1curr
I've been really enjoying these last bunch of videos; great work!
Wow I have no recall of how many times I have searched for something and end up watching a Phil's video. I just got gifted an older Cirrus logic GD5446BV 4mb. Seeing that other card I have more or less an idea of the potential this one has
I bought a few years ago the s3 trio64 v+, an aureal vortex2 sq and a voodoo3 together for 10€ from a local seller that was getting rid of "some old stuff". I've been using it ever since and it has been a very good card, no black level issues for me. Recently, I found an s3 trio64 v2/dx in an old pc, and I kept it. It wold be cool to make a comparison between the two, and to see which one is better.
In case anyone sees this. The great grandad of AMD video cards."Diamond" made the Speedstar and Stealth variants using the Cirrus Logic, and the S3 chips. I found the Diamond viper v330 based on the Riva128 good to if you can find the drivers, since Nvidia does not have them.
The S3's have been known to have some performance drops in some DOS games. Windows however it does better.
I seem to remember the ET6000 really shone in Windows. It had quite a lot of "linedraw" / "Flood fill" acceleration. Mind you, that was QUITE a few years ago now.
As always excellent review. I owned both the Cirrus Logic 5446 and ET6000 back in the day, and the one thing I do remember is that the Windows (3.1 and 9x) drivers for the Cirrus Logic was not that good, as it was a little buggy, while Tseng driver was faster and more reliable. But it has been a very long time since I ran either of these, and also I realize that this review is retro gaming focused, so your advice is spot on. I just know that when building my PCs back in the day, the ET6000 (even ET4000 though slower) was the better non 3D choice if you ran Windows and DOS, with the Matrox Millennium being the best if you could afford it. These ET6000 were what I teamed my Voodoo (I and II) cards with. Of course none of these are the best for Directx, or OpenGL. Thank you for all your hard work on these reviews, it brings back good memories. :)
i use a S3 Trio 64V+ in my Pentium 133 rig and it's pretty compatible, works fine with both Windows 3x and 9x.
Thanks for another great video Phil! Good to learn about S3 VBE2.0, I'll use it with my ViRGE/GX.
Thank you, provokes my envy.
My Pentium 200 MMX originally had an S3 virge DX, and in DOS games with the VESA driver loaded it did really well. I upgraded to a 3Dfx voodoo 3 2000 and DOS games just didn't look as good as with the S3 card. Now the 3Dfx blew the S3 away in 3D acceleration, but in DOS games the S3 just looked better.
The Cirrus Logic always performed and perfectly supported all the hardware video modes. I never found a DOS game that did not work. (I've tried over 1000 games)
1000 games? Nice, that certainly puts a lot of weight on your opinion. I tried far less but still formed a good opinion.
Literally used the Trident on Win 2000 a couple of days ago to browse the modern web. lol
You should try the 640x480 benches again with the UniVBE program. That speeds up most graphics cards in this era.
Small fact: 64 bit chips run on half speed if the card has installed only one memory bank (usually 2MB), because the memory chips had 32bit path. Graphics chip memory controller use the memory interleaving technique to write double word value to both memory banks concurrently - one word to each bank.
You loaded the vesa bios to RAM for the Trio64. If DN calls vesa bios functions extensively the fastest access became tangible. I had an OEM Tseng ET6000 and I could also see some performance difference when I loaded brand (Diamond etc) BIOS to RAM. I can not recall the name of the tool. 24+ years ago in another galaxy.... :-D
Phil why didn't You tested ATI Mach 64?
Picked up a 233mmx and this video is very interesting. I am looking to get a 3d capable card but this was interesting as I currently have a Legend 64 1mg card of which Ive never heard of before! Quake and Duke3d work pretty well!
Both of those games don't use a 3D accelerator, everything is rendered on the CPU and the graphics card just draws the images.
An awesome roundup as usual but the VBE you mentioned wasn't only useful for the S3-cards. Basically it was useful for every card especially when BIOSes were not meeting later VESA-standards or struggled with those. In the last days I used PCI-cards and even VLB-cards the VBE was one of my standard programs loaded. And if I remember right my Cardex ET4000-card had quite a good bump in performance using the VBE.
True! Good post!
Had S3 my self. Good old 98 :)
i just found a s3 trio 64v+ 2mb and cirrus logic gd5434 1mb at the thrift store, both a buck each, both work fine.
Great bargain.
Very good videos! That probably means I'm old..
Haha, this hobby keeps you young :D
Tell that to my newly discovered grey hairs..
>
No mach 64?:(
Or Matrix Millennium I 😋
Ati 3d Rage 1 and 2 too
the 3rd one down, was in my first hardware attempt of of an upgrade. It was that pcb without the populated sockest, can´t remember the research. But end story short, got those chips and planted them on my moms 486sx Cyrix, and sweated for a couple of hours while she was at work to configurate those .sys files and that misterious himem.sys one on the starup and the dangerous BIOS hahhahaha.
The next one was a voodoo 1 that had the same 2 sockects(or similar) and did the same but for an 8 to 16(or was it 4 to 6? or 8?...) meg upgrade. That was really hands on experiences for a 12 year old. With the 2d card/3d card patch through and all.
That Tseng label later on, confused the hell out of me, with the configs of games etc....
Hi, Phil,
Your videos recently inspired me to start work on an FPGA-based WaveTable synth.
It's something that I've been wanting to do for years, but never got around to it.
I did try about a year ago just to play some 8-bit audio samples in a simple drum machine style, but I never got that working fully.
But, last week, I started again, and I've learned a lot about Verilog since the last time, and managed to get it working. ;)
It's using an 8-bit sample set atm (the one from Amiga Doom / 64doom), so they were only sampled at 11,025 Hz as well, but it's not sounding too bad.
By far the hardest part was figuring out how to implement the polyphony, and how to grab all the samples at once. That was a serious headache to debug. It can now do 32-voice polyphony though.
Here's a clip of the Descent 2 theme, but with "fake" stereo (half of the voices assigned to each channel), and with some reverb added using Cool Edit Pro...
drive.google.com/file/d/0B1grqFdAErsrbDJTM05lM1BPS0E/view
And here's a funny screwed-up version from earlier, as I was trying to add the pitch bend...
drive.google.com/file/d/0B1grqFdAErsrQUItQk5DbmRBQTA/view
And finally, here's the Monkey Island theme, in mono, but also with reverb added after the recording...
drive.google.com/file/d/0B1grqFdAErsrLVZXOFdSNzhBc1U/view
It should be no problem at all to handle 22 KHz sample sets, and probably 44.1 / 48 KHz as well.
I'm using the DE1 dev board though, so it's only using it's Flash chip in 8-bit mode.
To use 16-bit samples would mean implementing SDRAM reading / writing, or grabbing one byte at a time from Flash (which is already a tad slow).
I'm just working on adding proper SoundFont 2 support though. That will hopefully lead to adding things like XG support, and of course the MT-32 and AWE32 SoundFonts etc. :)
Anyway, I've loved watching your vids (again) recently, and saw the MMX one last night. Keep up the good work. :)
Quite strange hearing the guitar solo in Descent 2 without the pitch bend, isn't it? lol
btw, the whole synth core is using pure logic, so no CPU / MCU cores or anything like that.
The MIDI files are being played by my external player though (based on the "MrMIDI 2" project online), but the MIDI input goes directly into an IO pin on the FPGA board, and then it just spits out the audio, and that's it.
The latency must be VERY low, because it's grabbing the full set of 32 samples in only 66 clock cycles (at 24 MHz), so that only takes around 2.7 microseconds (whereas receiving a MIDI byte takes a whole 320us).
The 32 sample outputs are updated faster than the highest note playback, so the output is running at around 93 KHz atm. The main limiting factor is the speed of the Flash chip (70ns), but I could still bump up the main clock to much higher rates, and probably manage to do 88 KHz samples etc.
I had an AWE32 card in the 90s, and loved just listening to MIDIs all day, and messing with keyboards etc.
I also used to repair and use many different "retro" machines, IBM XT / AT, and newer PCs, and of course fondly remember seeing games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake for the first time.
Oh wow, that sounds really cool! The Descent 2 track reminds of a mix between wavetable and an Amiga! If that makes sense. It does sound a bit raw around the edges, but very unique and fitting for an older retro gaming PC. Heck that's one cool project!
I do have the Mist FPGA computer, so I know a bit about FPGA, and I think it's awesome. Man, keep working on it, this is one cool idea. Imagine a SF2 compatible board, maybe a wavetable board itself?
Do keep me in the loop please about this one :D
PhilsComputerLab
Thanks. ;)
Yep, the synth does have a certain charm to it atm. I know it has that slight crackle too, but that's just where the sample update is clashing with the MIDI Note On stuff (if the MIDI state machine is currently accessing the ROM to grab the sample header, the audio update has to wait a few extra clocks for that to finish, hence the clicks).
That will all be fixable of course, and I'll be testing a proper Soundfont later.
Ahh, if you have a MiST board, then I can definitely get it running on that. ;)
I don't have one myself, but I designed a "breakout" board for the BeMicro CV boards before, and I have most of the design done for a board that's essentially more of a MiST "clone".
I've been holding off on getting that made though, as I realised that I may have the new-new HDMI board done in a few months, and that will have a similar spec to the MiST, and have the SDRAM etc., but on a tiny board of only around 55mm by 45mm.
I also didn't really want to do a "clone" that would seem like somebody else's work tbh. Then again, the MiST is essentially generic (as with many FPGA boards), and at least they have made the sources available for all the cores now. I must try the Archimedes one soon. :p
I will keep you updated on the synth, and may be sending you a file to test on the MiST if / when I get SDRAM support working.
I may be able to load the Soundfonts into SDRAM without needing a CPU core at all though, as I already wrote a FAT32 / SD card core.
Oh, and yes - one of the goals of the synth project will be to get some proper PCBs made for a WaveTable add-on board. ;)
I just figured out the basics for the SF2 format last night. It's actually quite a simple format once I understood what the docs was on about when it was talking about the "chunks" in the file. Really, the SF2 is just a collection of simple headers, and then some other entries that relate to the patch info, and then point back to the offsets for the samples etc.
Shouldn't take too long to implement. Only issue is that the Flash chip on the DE1 dev board is only being used in the 8-bit wide mode, so I'll have to do two accesses for each of the 16-bit sample values, or just get the SDRAM loading working.
I haven't added the velocity, pitch bend, aftertouch, ADSR, nor any effects yet, but just hearing some 22KHz or 44.1KHz samples will be a massive improvement.
I haven't had any issues with hanging notes yet, as there's no real possibility that it can miss any MIDI data. It's not even buffering the data in a FIFO as such yet, it just runs so fast that it can always process the MIDI data before the next byte even arrives.
Well if you ever release this and need support / a review let me know :D FPGA is cool, though SOC board computers like the Raspberry Pi / Orange Pi are getting more powerful also. The community already has FluidSynth as well as Munt running on the P2 and Pi 3 through a MIDI in. Something to keep in mind. I'm also playing around with that, but it's more to learn about the Pi, how to program the GPIO pins and basically just to learn something new :D
That's the thing - the reward for me is doing as much as possible in raw logic rather than using a Pi etc.
It's not quite like "real" hardware on a Rasp Pi or SOC, because it's running a lot of stuff in software of course, and there's usually that underlying OS to get in the way.
I do enjoy messing with the Rasp Pi and other SOC boards, and I expect the latency is just fine for most things, but writing the FPGA code from scratch means that I'll have complete control over every aspect (for the first time for a MIDI project).
It will also have ultra-low latency, and can still (eventually) use large sample sets with high sample rates / bit depths etc. without loading down nor requiring a CPU.
It's also easier to hook up things like other classic synth chips - the very proto board I have the MIDI signal hooked up to atm also has a socket for a YM2612 chip, for example. ;)
I do a little bit of C coding, but Verilog and raw logic is somehow easier for me, and it's cool just to be making "real" hardware once the FPGA is configured. :p
I'm thinking about building a full MIDI synth with a keyboard action etc. It's quite hard to find the decent actions at a reasonable price though. I've just been looking for some, but I want the type that has the proper switch bars under the keys, instead of the horrible rubber pads used on my current keyboards.
I had a Cheetah MK7 MIDI keyboard in the 90s, and it was brilliant. It did have a few keys missing though, and a fault with the EPROM meant that it only worked about 10% of the time you powered it up. It's still one of the best I've tried though.
Still have Tseng Labs on my old pc Pentium 200 mmx, 128 mb ram and Tseng Labs ET6600 or ET 6300 i believe 4mb revision, cant remember anymore but oddly it could run 3d games nicely up to direct X 6
My first PC in 94 came with a built in Trident video chip with 512K video ram.
Just looking through a old box of stuff as i was thinking of building a 486 retro pc, i have every card in this test except the Tseng ET6000 lol, plus a couple of later S3 cars. Also found about 12 various cpus from 386 to 486, now just got to find a nice old case.
Trios and Virge's can be found for under 2 Euros very easily at least in the Baltics. Sometimes looking at local advert/sales websites for old hardware for under 10Euros can net you deals way better than anything on ebay as they are often sold as just "old pci videocard". Their sheer availability is an extremely nice thing. You can buy multiples of them and have spares/win the lottery on vga output. Cirrus however is just solid, the only potential issue could be availability
A very comprehensive review.
Four years later but if you somehow read this - I have a 'normal' Trio64 paired with a Monster 3D in my DOS rig (200MMX with 64MB RAM). Would it be worth upgrading it to a Trio64+ or Trio64V2? Am not sure how much of a performance bump it is between those cards and can't seem to find any info.
used to use trio s3 cards to add monitors back in the early 2000s and late 90s.
I used to have that same Trident PCI card back in the day. The PCI connector on this card was terrible. Any small vibrations or abrupt motion of the case caused the card to momentarily disconnect, freezing the entire system. I got a Millennium II shortly after and the problem went away.
I bought that Trident for $5 because I found those S3 Trios in too many PC's and got tired of it. It's nice to have something time correct and different.
I had a Toshiba P4 laptop that used a variant of that Trident as the integrated graphics chip for some reason. It was EXTREMELY slow for XP.
For the trident card I upgraded its vram by pulling random dram chips off scrap electronics.
You want 40 pin 256x16 bit DRAM chips. I got mine from an og xbox optical drive (that I bricked, still kicking myself for that...), and an old canon flatbed scanner that wouldn't work for some reason.
If you have a load of old IDE optical drives laying around that you DON'T care about, check in them. You might find these ram chips.
I have a S3 Trio64v+ manufactured by STB, excellent build quality, has 2 MB soldered on. Also have the Trident TGUI9680, abit slower than the S3 Trio but very, very compatible with DOS games. The only bad thing is that it was manufactured by Union, maybe the worst card maker, the PCB looks and feel ultra cheap.
I junked my late 1997 PC for space reasons concluding nobody would have a use for it and it would be worth very little. Dosbox was at the point where it might serve as a replacement. Also I forgot how bad the control system of the old FPS games was.
Sounds like there might be a market for the old stuff now. It felt like sacrilege to toss away a working vintage PC but I needed the space and had concluded my retro gaming experiments on it.
How do some of the newer 3D PCI cards handle? I have a socket 7 with a K6-2 400 in it. It has a Riva TNT2 Pro PCI in it right now. I'd love to see how the TNT2, Rage, Matrox, and S3 accelerators do in both 2D and 3D on non-Super Socket 7 systems under your tests.
You May test those in Windows, also trying mpg video acceleration. S3 was really great card in Windows!!!
S3 also had crap drivers (I had a Trio 64, followed by a S3 Virge). The S3 Virge replaced the Trio family and was one of the 1st graphics cards to support 3D acceleration, sadly it didn't have the grunt to run the features at a reasonable framerate, making the feature rather redundant (if you used the feature in most games, the framerate fell through the floor, although for the time it did look rather pretty!) 😁
Round 2 pls with more Tseng! Maybe pit it against a Matrox as well.
Those are the main cards I got :)
I've got an S3 Trio64V+ and an ARK Logic ARK2000PV with memory sockets like the trident, but they're empty. What do I need to put in them to expand them properly?
as a matrox fanboy i wish id see more cards "from canada" here...
GREAT review! But a little 4k driver being an issue for the S3 card? Good grief, that's what QEMM or even MemMaker is for. The S3 is clearly (overwhelmingly) the superior card for the money, while the TSENG only wins by basically splitting hairs. Also, the tseng is hideously overpriced compared to what you actually get out of it, especially if you can even find one with the memory still in it (good luck). For the best of all worlds with no problems, get an S3 Virge GX, which is the Trio64GX with 3D. That's a smokin' hot little video card, and you can find them for pennies (just bought one for $11US). And the best part of all? The S3 cards were the unofficial standard all developers aimed for, like how the soundblaster cards were the unofficial standard for audio. This means the S3 cards enjoy bulletproof compatibility.
Those 4KB of base memory spent on the VBE driver shouldn't be an issue, because very few games modern enough to run at 640x480 needs massive amounts of base memory. And having more than the required amount isn't going to speed things up, so it should be fine. I had an S3 Trio64V+ back in the day, and this never caused any issues for me. And with 2MB of video memory, it's likely you'll want to run 800x600 @ 32bit colour in Windows, which would be a bit faster on the S3 compared to the Cirrus if my memory serves me right.
I can recommend an ARK 2000 based card. Won all benchmarks I made, outperforms even my S3s.
How many dialects are there in Australia? I have noticed a regional difference like we have in the states. Southern draw, stubborn west coast pronounce everything like Siri to midwest talk with out using a nose …
ahh, I remember those VBE driver. since I don't have internet back then only to buy compilation of "pirated" softwares; then there were UNIVBE, really indeed improve my Winfast S3 with 1MB RAM.
Never had S3VBE, sold the PC before internet era.
I remember running unreal 1 for the first time on pentium 120Mhz with 32MB RAM & S3 1MB Winfast.
Still only got a powerpoint slide show, but hey it's fully 3D in glorious 16 bit colors and you can see a reflection of yourself on the floor (jaw dropped back then).
nice video, it would be nice to have some feedback on compatibility with dos games, we all know during that time some games were a mess depending on what videocard you had, for example commander keen games were glitchy depending on the videocard, while trident was the low budget it offered pretty good compatibility. I owned a trident VLB card and i enjoyed it a lot playing games.
My take on DOS game compatibility is that people like to focus on the 0.1% of games that have issues and then declare what is or isn't a good DOS card 😅 For the 99.9% of games it really doesn't matter and they will look and play just fine.
I need help, Which one better "S3 Trio 3D" or "S3 Trio64 V+" or "S3 Trio64 V2/DX?"
I have S3 Virge DX 4MB. and link for download driver GPU too.
The S3 VIRGE DX Is an S3 64V+ update with a Little 3d function
There's little chance that you see this comment, but did you try out these cards with Windows? I have that Trident card, but when I try to use it with any version of Windows it glitches in a really interesting way. I think my card is just faulty somehow but I wondered if anyone else ran into an issue.
i am using s3 virge dx 4mb(50ns) pci in my pentium 200mhz rig
How does the 2D performance of 3D cards like the Riva TNT2, ATi Rage or Matrox compare?
That might be something for another video.
They can often be slower, as I recall (still have one about) the S3 Trio64-V2 and S3 ViRGE (3D/DX) will typically provide the best bang for your buck in terms of 2D Acceleration.
VESA Vibe 1.3b or above is necessary for DOS Gaming, but as long as you have > 8MB System RAM and you load it into High Mem you won't run into any 'Edge' Cases where you don't have enough Base Mem.
Specifically I recall this affecting games like X-Wing, F1GP, etc. still in terms of Windows 3.x (Win32GS) or Windows 95a/b/c (DirectX 5); you will see the S3 absolutely dominating performance wise even against 3D Accelerator Cards unless Memory is an issue.
As I recall the All-in-Wonder was ATIs Solution to this, with arguable results.
Personally I'd generally recommend an S3 ViRGE DX/2 + 3DFX Banshee.
Now don't get me wrong the ViRGE was certainly a decent Budget 3D Card, but 3DFX was by far the best option available at the time in terms of Performance.
This would usually be closely followed by Matrox Mystique or Power VR, assuming games actually supported them... which was the biggest problem for most competitors to 3DFX in the Mid-Late 90s.
The same would be true for the RIVA TNT and NV-1.
It is better to have consistent performance and support (IMO) than the odd gem that was designed specifically for said Card that provides Great FPS. There also was very little stock (at the time) placed on Benchmarks as it was quite well known that Developers would optimise the hell out of getting good Scores on common benchmark programs to give the illusion they were more awesome than they really were.
Not much has really changed really.
Leyvin (StudioRaven) Riva TNT and NV-1: You could not get any more different in graphics chips if you tried. The NV-1 used Quadratic rendering as opposed to the triangles that every other graphics chip used. It really was only applicable in full strength to Sega Saturn and Sega arcade board-derived games, and in fact, the only PC card to use that chip provided ports to use Saturn controllers with. While they did make an OpenGL compatible driver, it was really hampered trying to translate between the two.
The Riva TNT threw that out and went with the same triangle-based rendering all the other cards used (and still use), and was actually pretty well supported in the day before DirectX was released as middleware to both make a lot of that moot and put a nail in the Voodoo's coffin as Glide was not compatible with DirectX. With the increasing focus on Windows for gaming, specialized APIs like Glide became less important, but 3Dfx was slow to move on from Glide and suffered for it in the long run. Really, the window of Glide dominance was actually somewhat small in the grand scheme of things.
Leyvin (StudioRaven) the Tseng ET6300 was rebranded as the ATi Rage 128 after ATi bought them. It may surprise you.
JohnnyNismo
I think both of you are forgetting the Riva 128 and confusing it with the Riva TNT.
Cheapest way to get an ET6000 card is to search ebay for STB LIGHTSPEED 128 and you will find them for $15. Yes it is the 2MB version, but that is really plenty for dos gaming.
Yea like I said it depends a lot on the region. Shipping to AU is what kills it most of the time.
I have a trident like that, with the memory chips, but it's a 9685
Maybe I missed it. We're any ATi Mach32/64 era cards considered? I would have thought they would be quite competitive.
I came across an old windows xp pc now it has one of these graphics card It's the
TGUI94440-3 trident '94
I have an old Trident... something... says copyright 1992 on it, it's an ISA video card!
Hi Phil! :) Now I have some S3 graphics cards. Like the S3 Trio and S3 Virge/DX. Which one is faster? Do you know where I could get detailed info about the S3 cards? Thank you! I am using Google, but not much luck so far.
I had the Trident 9685 it takes 4mb memory. yours with the filled memory slots should provide 4mb too!
How would these compare to an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2? I'm pondering either that or an ATI 3D Rage Pro if I do end up building a retro PC again.
I have an S3 Velocity 3D that has 4MB RAM (non-RAMDAC) and a memory expansion that gives it 8MB RAM (RAMDAC), but certain software can see all 8MB RAM. Hell, the games that say "Pentium II recommended" run at great framerates in Windows 98SE and I get between 90 and 100FPS in DooM and that's on an AMD K6-2/300 CPU.
I have tried the CL and S3 head to head. In real gaming or actual use, I do not notice any difference as such. They are only really noticeable when benching. So my recommendation is to get the cheapest of them. On a P133 to P166, is does not matter, as the CPU is the definitive bottleneck. S3 has a clear and sharp image quality. The CL has more vibrant colours and generates a more "cozy" image quality. Price are to me, what makes me recommend the right card on an mid range Pentium one.
At 320 x 200 I agree. Do make sure to watch the part with 640 x 480 games. The S3VBE20 driver can make quite a difference.
PhilsComputerLab True.... Highres games are a complete different ballgame.
Yea I wish more games had a FPS counter. We need something like FRAPS for DOS :)
PhilsComputerLab If numbers are whats count.... Count. Numbers. Yeah. :-D (just joking). Anyway. to get real again.
I tend to look at a lot of factors, when choosing the best card. One is naturally the benchmark numbers, there is the question on how will it look on a TFT monitor as I have seen some PCI cards make them vertical spaghetti Lines. Then there is the question: "Will it run smoothly"? And then finally the price. You went into these questions in you'r video too. So many people responding with benchmark numbers only, when asked about the best card of all. :-D
Sorry for bad writing. I am on my phone that does what it just wants.
Thank you, it's really interesting video aside from money. It would be such a pleasure if run quake on your suggested pci card. Also I like to run a 2 x agp card intel 740 on a 2x supported mother board someday. ;)
S3 Trio 64 (non V+) vs S3 Virge ?
IIRC, Tseng 6000 was one of higher end (expensive) vga card back in 1996 era; but one of the most expensive one was "Oxygen" card with 12MB memory, dunno if anyone ever bought or even heard about it.
I just never seen them IRL, just price info from some very old computer catalogue when I get my very 1st PC.
Oh, one more thing, my first PC was using Winfast 1MB VGA card (oh the memory), which uses S3 Virge chip.
I'd say it was a good compatibility chip, but nothing special; some S3 cards would allow you to upgrade to 2MB memory for SXGA resolution.
The Trident were pretty popular in Brazil in the 90's
Cool, thanks for sharing!
Nice comparison, but I would have been interested in also learning your opinion regarding 2D video quality. I, for one, could certainly give up a few FPS for a sharper image. :)
For DOS, which is mostly 320x200, shouldn't matter much. Windows is a different story, here you could see differences. Matrox are the way to go for this...
Thanks for the fast reply, Phil. In my experience, DOS is also problematic. I have video cards that have exceptional 2D quality in 720 x 400 / 640 x 480 (Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3, Elsa GeForce 2 MX / GTS), others that were horrible but fixed them by removing the RFI filter (Asus V7700 GeForce 2 GTS, Inno3D GeForce 3 Ti 200), and some that seem to be unfixable (basically, all of my Riva TNT / TNT2 cards, Medion GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x, etc). Some are so blurry that even the text on the DOS command prompt is a pain to read.
@@ruxandy I see. I haven't noticed much, but admit that I haven't done much DOS stuff with Nvidia cards. I have old ISA cards and here I can see sort of stripes on LCD monitors.
@Dalle Smalhals never said that these were all the GPUs I owned. I also have ISA, VLB and PCI video cards from the DOS era. The cards I listed above were just as an example that even newer cards can suffer from poor image quality.
I had all of them except Tseng :) Oh and I had 2MB VRAM S3 805 on VLB :) Combined with MS DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 on an 486DX2/66. Actually maybe some comparision between speeds of VLB and PCI video cards?
I have an S3 Trio64UV+. Good enough?
Only problem is that it'll only work with the miniport driver in Windows ME or NT4 driver in Win2000 which is kinda bad. I like playing Diablo on it and it worked well in 2000 once and now it just lags.
In DOS however, it's awesome!
Hi, great video!
I was just looking around on eBay and came across a listing for a S3 Trio 64V for 3€. Should I get it?
If you want one, yes, it's suppose to be the normal price for those cards. People give them usually (that's how I got my cirus logic to). They are not worth 45$. If you pay that price, you are juste helping the prices to go higher and helping greedy people that scavenge the parts for next to nothing.
OK, thx for the reply.
I didn't get it. I do already own a S3 Virge / DX 4MB just in case I want to build something retro.
:)
i have found some socket 3 and socket 7 boards on ebay for reasonable prices, but many are really expensive like $120 all the way to $500, sound card and video cards of that era are getting pricey too, i guess out of greed or the parts getting rarer and rarer from recycling.
I have a ton of the s3 trio64v2's 😂. I should test my agp s3 trio3D2x with s3vbe
Good thing I used ebay back in the early 2000s to collect cards. One card I missed getting was rendition 2200
I just stick with my old graphics decelerator (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro) for DOS, since its useless for 3D games (which all run properly under Windows ME with my Voodoo 2 SLI)).
I had a Trio64V+, got it in an AIO in very late 1995. Guessing I got stuck with the sucky drivers.
That Trident 9680 is a low power version, ergo the lower performance.
I'm also a bit curious how cards work in Windows NT 4.0 and 2000? I have a couple of retro DUAL-CPU computers that I need to get going. I suppose 3D cards are better suited for their power, but have you ever considered using an operating system other than Win98?
If you wanted 3D it was OpenGL or nothing with NT4 or 2000, and none of these chipsets supported OpenGL.
IIRC you could get some limited Direct3D or Glide support in 2000 but most driver support was poor for gaming class 3D chipsets - drivers focused on Win98 at that time.
Most people doing OpenGL work in NT4/2000 were dropping serious cash for things like FireGL boards.
Actually, in 2000, you had pretty much all the Direct3D options you have in XP. But yeah, it was OpenGL or nothing in NT, mostly.
Voodoo killed them all
damn
It is interesting, what is the world slowest PCI video card? As we know the fastest one is Zotac GT610, in different situations also GT520 and GT430, i guess all are based on Nvidia Fermi chip. But what's the slowest? Maybe Trident?
Pffft, PCI will never take off, I'm sticking with vesa local bus.
is the memory upgrade chip causing some performance issue? or rather just because its graphic chip
Hmm, So if i have a Tseng Labs ET6000 4,5MB(4 x 1.125MB) from ViewTop - all four in sockets - it's pretty rare?
ATi took over Tseng Labs right about after the ET6000 came out. Will there be a follow up video featuring a Rage card?
The Rage is a bit to "powerful" for this project IMO. I also don't have anything with PCI.
PhilsComputerLab : Fair enough, I'd still like too how a Rage XL performs on this platform since you can buy them brand new. Yes, they do come in PCI.