Fastest VLB Video Card for Windows 3.11

From: jpero_at_sympatico.ca <(jpero_at_sympatico.ca)>
Date: Wed Apr 28 16:33:47 2004

> A while ago I put together a 486/66 system to play around with all my windows 3.1 apps I have used in the past. I was wondering what the fastest VLB video card ever made for windows 3.1x was. I remem>
> Google has allot of information about what the best DOS gaming card was, but not that much on windows 3.1 (which is what I am interested in).
>
> Also what's the best video intensive benchmarking app to test out cards with?
>
> I have the following cards (and others but they are slower):
>
> Diamond Viper VLB 1mb VRAM
> Diamond Viper VLB 2mb VRAM
> (while both have the P9000 chip for windows acceleration they have 2
> different chips for vga)

Correct: The dual chipsets was oak chipset and P9000. The dos mode
is slooooooow. Unaccelerated slow but when in accelerated it's very
quick.

> Diamond Video 3000 (Stealth 64 Video Vram VLB) 4mb (S3 968 Chipset)

S3 was decent for the gaming and GUI acceleration.

> Diamond Speedstar pro VLB 1mb DRAM

This WAS what I had, there was four versions:
1MB (expandable to two), 2MB, some was Tnesg 4000/W32i or W32p
I had 2MB W32p VLB. Very nice for old gaming like doom, windows and
dos mode. It is more like all-around chipset and fast. But there is
so many generic and good other brands based on the Tnesg 4000/W32p
VLB cards not just Hercules.

S3 968 is also good and fast in GUI acceleration mode and supported
by many games. Uncertain in text mode.

> Hercules graphite 1mb VRAM (IIT chipset)

Very little support because IIT chipset wasn't so common back then.

The MOST common ones were sucky cirrus logic or slooow Trident. Some
S3'ers, least common was Tnesg or P9000.

> Matrox Plus 2mb VLB (early matrox chip and a very long card that has space
> for another 2mb vram)

That, I haven't seen one YET! Got a photo of this?

I may be wrong but didn't Matrox produced Millennium I VLB not PCI?

> These cards are from the early 90's so it should be on-topic for the list.

Parallel to this classic video cards from that era, my friend had his
P9000 based PCI had 8 VRAM and RAMDAC ICs all liberally burnt up!

Cheers,

Wizard
Received on Wed Apr 28 2004 - 16:33:47 BST