Comparing 31 Retro Video Cards for the 486 - Part 1 : ISA and VLB Cards

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Күн бұрын

We compare a monster load of retro video cards for a 486 PC that supports ISA, VLB and PCI video cards. Which are the fastest cards? Which cards run the greatest number of benchmarks?
We find it all out in this 2 part video series.

Пікірлер: 38

@jdspencer60 5 ай бұрын

I can't remember what my old VESA bus video card was but I seem to remember Cirrus Logic. I scrounged that card up when i was a kid from a local person in my rural community and installed it in my 486 33mhz computer, later I got the stacker 5x86 133 mhz chip for it. I really just wanted to play warcraft 2 tides of darkness and games like wolfenstein 3d and doom

@Baoran 3 жыл бұрын

You need to load vesa bios extension with et4000ax card with either vmode software that comes with some of the cards or univbe 5.x software (univbe 6.x does not support them) PCPbench should work after loading that.

@Txm_Dxr_Bxss 11 ай бұрын

The V7 vega seems to be a cirrus logic card too. I have one and speedsys actually said that it detected a GD54XX card. It seems like they all share the same core, except a feature called Bit blit, so this is mostly relevant in Windows. That's why these 3 cards all perform the same.

@PCRetroTech 11 ай бұрын

This sounds right. Bit blit is for copying one region of video RAM to another, or in some cases from system memory to video RAM or vice versa. Some of my more recent videos on 8514/A and XGA explore blitters a bit more, and in later videos I'll for sure look at the blitters in some of these Super VGA cards.

@Bruno-Guitarist 9 ай бұрын

My first computer, a 386 DX40, came preinstalled with a generic VGA card. I remember when it got upgraded to a Cirrus Logic SVGA card many games like for example DOOM became way more smooth, anthough not by todays standard. It became playable in low detail. Today we think that software rendering means "done by cpu", but this was clearly not the case, or at least not the whole picture.

@Aerotinge 2 ай бұрын

18:34 For Tseng ET3000AX, you need a VBE driver loaded to enable its 640x480 8bpp mode. I believe the same applying to the Oak and Paradise VGA ISA. ET3000AX scores 2.2 point on my DX486-33Mhz on PC Player Vesa Mode 101h test, and it scores 17.5 on 3D Bench ISA test, which is pretty close to your test, 17.8 points. So I think this is a valid value. And as for Chris 3D test, this one is CPU related, comprehensive test, Therefore, it cannot be used as a performance comparison of a graphics card. The ET3000AX got 20.9 and 6.6(640x480) respectively on my 486.

@FOIL_FRESH 3 жыл бұрын

i'm waiting for my vlb socket 3 mobo / dx100 / standard trident isa video card and was wondering if i should get a vlb vga card - it seems like thats a hard "yes". really helpful vid. thanks

@alvaroacwellan9051 3 жыл бұрын

Tseng ET4000 is a huge wildcard here. It can be very fast but I've seen ISA variants that were quite slow, or were slow but nicely paced up by one simple jumper which I don't know why was on slow setting back in the 20th century when someone used it... They also may or may not have VESA BIOS extension. There are other fast ISA cards too that would narrow the gap between ISA and VLB a bit. If it isn't the mainboard that limits these one then this particular one is a slow ET4000 - so I say a fast ET4000 is a good one but a WDC 90C31, a Trident 8900D (MUCH faster than any other ISA Trident, 8900CL included) and Cirrus Logic CL-GD5426..29. I've tried a few ISA S3 cards too but they didn't prove that fast. I found VLB Cirrus Logic cards quite meh, btw. VLB ET4000 is really fast, though. S3 cards are fast too, especially Trio32/64. Ark Logic is fast in VLB too (the PCI version is by no means no worse, btw) and Trident 9440s are fine, again. These are what I found (from recycling center pieces too) but one thing remains the same - even the fastest ISA cards can't hold a candle to decent VLB ones.

@OpenGL4ever Жыл бұрын

In the old days, the CPU had to do the calculations and shovel the calculated pixel values directly into the VRAM via its BUS system, which was slow ISA at 8 MHz or fast VLB at max. 40 MHz. The videocard itself was completely passive, at least this applies to DOS games. Some videocards did have some 2d hardware acceleration features like bit blitting that could have been used for games, but because of the lack of a uniform graphics driver API in DOS and the direct addressing of the VRAM by the game specific software 3d engine this was not used for DOS games. Also WinG didn't support acceleration features. The users had to wait for DirectDraw which came with DirectX 3 and Windows 95. At that time, the first real 3d acceleration videocards appeared on the marked. The Voodoo Graphics was released in October 1996.

@PROSTO4Tabal Жыл бұрын

Hi. Which of this video cards have support in Win95? I am interested in running some 2d games with directx 1 on the oldest specs possible. Please help. I am in the middle of building Pentium 75 socket 5 system

@PCRetroTech Жыл бұрын

I would expect all of these have support in Windows 95. Of course you have to install the drivers for them which you can probably find on the Vogons driver archive.

@NintenloupWolfFR 4 жыл бұрын

Well, glad to know that i dont need to break the bank to get snappy card. So long pricy Tseng

@Dxceor2486 4 жыл бұрын

Interesting, I had different results using other ISA cards and my ISA et4000ax. But my et4000ax has a "turbo" jumper that makes it quite fast

@Dxceor2486 4 жыл бұрын

Well I ran some benchmarks : VLB Cirrus logic 5424 scores 10.7 fps in quake. ISA ET4000AX scores 10.4 fps in quake. Maybe it's some model specific difference, but mine is really good !

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

I would be interested in seeing this 486 machine you have. Do you have a video somewhere? By the way, I just discovered that the V7-Vega VLB card *is* a Cirrus Logic GD5428, which explains why its performance is exactly the same as the other GD5428 cards.

@Dxceor2486 4 жыл бұрын

@@PCRetroTech I don't have a video but I could make one I guess. The motherboard is an infamous PCChips m912 but it has real cache so it has no real problems. I mentioned the Cirrus logic to show that my et4000 performs almost as fast as a vlb card in quake. It's slower than vlb for sure, but my ISA et4000 is much faster than any other ISA card. Also it has 1mb of 70ns ram if that makes any difference.

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

@@Dxceor2486 I'm definitely going to try the ISA ET4000AX in the other 486 and see how fast it runs Quake. And I'm going to see if I have a "turbo jumper". Is your ET4000AX a brand name board?

@Dxceor2486 4 жыл бұрын

@@PCRetroTech I don't know ... Unfortunately I left home for the week, I won't be back before Friday or Saturday so I can't tell you right now. I can probably dump the ROMs if that can help you ^^

@hammersbald7612 4 жыл бұрын

I always thought that old vga cards are just better ram banks that pump out vga signals as fast as the bus and the memory allow it. Was there any acceleration at all or are those old cards just glorious frame buffers? The benchmarks make it look like cheap memory and the bus system are the only limiting factor.

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

The later PCI cards usually had some 2D acceleration, and the S3 VIrge/DX even had a (horrible) 3D accelerator. But none of that would actually be used in any of the games or benchmarks used. There were some other differences, such as 8 bit vs 16 bit bus, or emulated 16 bit bus. They also all differed in the way they handled Super VGA, but again that likely doesn't factor into these benchmarks. If the RAM wasn't soldered on and was the same between all the boards, I'd swap it around to see what difference it makes.

@hammersbald7612 4 жыл бұрын

Found something on vcfed org “ISA maximum sustained transfer rate”.

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

@@hammersbald7612 It's a little hard to draw any conclusions from that, as the benchmarks and games are not updating everything on the screen every frame. We also don't know if they are just writing to screen memory or if they are first reading what's there, modifying it and writing the result back, which would obviously be twice the number of bus accesses. The CPU is clearly doing some calculation, there's DRAM refresh, interrupts and reading/writing to system memory. So the CPU isn't saturating the ISA bus, probably. But when it is using the ISA bus, it will be doing a lot of waiting around, especially if the card is inserting extra wait states.

@hammersbald7612 4 жыл бұрын

@@PCRetroTech I think the most accurate (card only not system) benchmark would be to just pump out single color frames and read them back. I'm really interested in why the tseng was faster. Better mmu implementation or just better ram?

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

@@hammersbald7612 I agree, and I might take up the challenge of implementing that at some point to try and find out!

@przemysawwegrowski988 4 жыл бұрын

Did vlb cards have an adittional 1MB?

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

I think the memory varied just as it did with ISA.

@shelby50411 4 жыл бұрын

I have question...why the heck are old obsolete used basically useless isa video cards so costly?...who uses 386 and 486 pcs anymore?...they have all been tossed in trash....

@PCRetroTech 4 жыл бұрын

Like everything that is 30-40 years old, they are hard to get, making them valuable to people who want them for retrocomputing.

@Notacka 2 жыл бұрын

Is a NES or SNES useless?

@Retro_PC 3 жыл бұрын

Russian subtitles please!!!

@warrax111 3 жыл бұрын

no, finally learn english in russia.

@shelby50411 4 жыл бұрын

So is my old 40 yr old crt tv worth 1000usd?...is my 30 yr old mobile phone worth 500usd?...is my 30yr old inkjet printer worth 500usd?...is my 30yr old 1mp camera worth 500 usd?. .no no no....these are all rare also but worthless junk.

@jacobw446 4 жыл бұрын

In the eye of the beholder. What makes caviar worth thousands? I wont eat it, but many people do! It is WORTH the money to them!

@LordPhan 3 жыл бұрын

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it - Publius Syrus - If there are more people who want something than there is supply of the thing, then those who want it more and have the means to work for it(Money is equivalent to labour) then they will do so by offering more labour(or capital in its place) for the good thus increasing the cost. This is simplified as "Supply and Demand". Rare items can be worthless when nobody wants them, and valuable if there are many people who do want them.

@Notacka 2 жыл бұрын

No one wants those. VLB video cards are the best video cards for 486 (save maybe the PCI cards) which makes the difference when playing later DOS games. CRTs are all mostly similar save for a few things here and there. Old mobile phones are barely usable, old digital cameras pushed out OK pictures. VLB video cards are not only rare but are fairly unique for older DOS machines which have gotten popular recently. Look at Voodoo cards, they are still worth a lot. The demand combined with the age has kept the prices up on these.