I programmed games for these cards between the mid 90s and early 2000s and the S3 Virge was always the most hated card as it was so slow but we had to support it. The only cards that we didn’t support were the early NVidia cards as they used forward mapped quads rather than reversed mapped triangles which made them impossible to use unless you designed your game to use them. I still have a bunch of old hardware from that time. 4 or 5 Pentium and Pentium 2 machines and around 20 graphics cards from that era.

My first 3D card was a S3 ViRGE in a Pentium 133 system. They were called 'graphics decelerators' for a reason; sure, the filtering was nice, but playing in software mode was pretty much always faster, even on the modest lower-end Pentiums of the day.

If you're not concerned about 3D performance, the S3 cards have really good VGA, EGA and even CGA/MDA/Hercules compatibility. An S3 PCI card in a 486 or pre-AGP Pentium makes for a really solid DOS gaming machine.

Yes... I have always suspected that the Virge was originally targeted for a 320x240 resolution to match mainstream 3D game consoles like the PlayStation, as it provided nearly N64-level graphics. But out of nowhere, the release of the 3dfx Voodoo established 640x480 as the new gaming standard, which Virge cannot match. The original specs of the Virge don't really seem like they were made for 640x480 gaming; for 16-bit color depth, two framebuffers already took up 1.2MB of video memory, not to mention the Z-buffer. There was no memory left for texture cache; most textures had to be streamed from system memory. I think this is the reason there is a nice performance boost when upgrading to 4MB of VRAM - much less texture streaming is needed.

Thanks for giving the S3 Virge another shot. My results are similar to yours, but I still love the S3 cards. The Trio 64V+ was my first ever graphics card, and I played a lot of DOS games with that. I had a Virge later on and it got me into some early Windows games and served as my 2D card when I got a Voodoo 1.

I installed a LOT of S3 Virge cards back in the day. Not for gaming, just for display. In those days, almost no motherboard had on-board graphics. The S3 Virge was cheap and Windows 98 had a perfectly usable driver built in.

Really glad you tested lower resolutions. :) 512x384 or 320x240 were much more realistic resolutions somebody would actually play at if they were unfortunate enough to have this card.

Thank you very much for the flashbacks of my late 90´s gaming experience... Was Celeron 266 MHz (boosted to 333MHz) and had 4mb S3 Virge in it :) ... Played nicely Viper Racing on low res/details, GTA / GTA London.... But struggled with GTA 2... It had black boxes around gun flare and lights + overall performance was shite... Still have fond memories and i want that S3 Virge back :(

my first 3d card was a 4mb ATI rage pro, changed my gaming world forever. Got the card and Jedi Knight for a birthday and seeing that game run at 640x480 and looking amazing made me stick with PC gaming ever since.

It's not double scanning at 512x384. It's just that modern scalers get confused by this resolution. Try using a CRT and you'll see quite big gaps between lines.

Great review, as usual. But the Virge core had some revisions during its lifetime. You've been reviewing the "325" core. If possible, try to review the DX/GX upgraded core, from a decent maker like STB or Diamond ("Nitro 3D" comes with 4MB onboard) Looking forward to seeing a lot more great content from you in 2024. Best wishes!

Wow, I remember discovering Terminal Velocity at a friend's house back in the day. Free flight in 3D was a completely new thing for me, and I was hooked.

I'd love to see a roundup with the ViRGE / DX / GX. I keep a DX in one of my Pentium setups, and an interesting card from Creative - 3D Blaster with Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D in another, but I migrated some others to a modified AliExpress special RageXL

So it really was the S3 Decelerator :)

You can overclock the Virge?! I gotta give this a go.

The fact that 3dfx came just a couple of months later, is also exactly how I remember it. So people who had the money, went for a S3 or similar, for fast and good 2D graphics and used a 3Dfx for all the 3D stuff. I don't remember that anyone ever thought that the S3 was an amazing 3D card? Seems just an idea from recent years maybe?

I remember to run tomb raider on a Virge GX at 320x240. Good times when we were humble and played with what we had! Have a good new year!

Das ist diesen Artikel noch einmal lesen kann, ist echt erstaunlich! 1996, das ist Ewigkeiten her! Ich war derzeit erst 11 Jahre alt und. Vielen Dank!

Yhm, so many memories, when trying to squeeze anything from my Virge DX 4MB to see at least a slideshow gameplay from Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit back in 1998. Finally using 400x300 resolution I could at least complete one lap at HomeTown map :) Regardless from Direct3D experience, Virge was a real beast with DirectDraw and this is why you can enjoy the Athlon boost for Software Mode, as the bitblt operation and double buffering is not creating a bottleneck for the CPU. Same test with SIS PCI card from that era and you would not have 30fps on Software D3D Mode

Im looking forward to DX variant

Great Video Phil! You do a great job mixing the history and the usability of the hardware. Keep on keeping on Man!

I always revisit Phil's Computer Lab to watch more videos!

another video that takes us back to the dawn of 3D Gaming The era of patches when developers optimized titles to adapt to the hardware. With the arrival of 3dfx and glide this world became even more fantastic. However, the Virge, like the Matrox Mystique and the first Renditions, have their own charm and each of these cards has something special to give us. Recently I finally tried a PowerVR PCX2 accelerator in its custom Matrox M3D it was a great experience that I want to further explore. Thanks for these videos, best wishes for 2024.

Always wanted to upgrade RAM on an S3. I still have one. Might be worth a look :)

Great video✌ and happy New year

Danka Phil! Enjoyed the examination :)

Back then I was in highschool and happy to have any video card. ^.^

Descent 2 - Yay!!!!! This made my day. Great comparison video Phil!

Love your content ❤

Well Phil, you gave it a fighting chance and it still couldn’t live up to its 3D expectations. I definitely admire your dedication in this series. It astounds me that they put this out as a 3D card presumably knowing its deficiencies, but maybe the bar was still low for PC 3D graphics in the pre-3Dfx era?

Very good video, thank you very much 👍

I always use 512x384 on 15" 1024x768 in order to get the best visuals on ultra lowend 3d cards (including voodoo1!)

thanks for your posts always very informative post you do Happy New Year to you and your family

Nice review

My first rig I ever built from scratch used this card, Cyrix 6x86 166, 16mb ram, and the brand of the card was BOCA, VLB version. I even purchased the extra 1mb of vram while I was at the computer fair. It boasted HW Mpeg1 I believe and came with a CD of ski videos. It wasnt totally horrible, then again I didnt know much better at the time.

This is a great card for any retro collection, It has a place in history. cheers. Happy New Year.

Really cool to see Terminal Velocity featured. I really enjoyed playing that as a kid.

Great video! Hope you had a good Christmas - have a Happy New Year!

Yeah. I bought Diamond Stealth 3D 2000, featuring S3 Virge. I've had very slow framerate in games i've been previously playing in software mode. But those filtered textures... i've been crying :)

This was my exact config, diamond stealth 4mb and poverstrip @77hz, thank you for reminding me :)

G'day Phil, 🥳🎉 Happy New Year to Everyone, I am really liking the format of these retro videos, plus the positivity of the content & comments so can't wait for more next year. I got eXoDOS & so excited because when skimming through the included game I found it has 😲Street Rod.

Very interesting experiments, thanks! I think it's time I revisted the mighty ViRGE...

It's kinda funny exploring the situations this DOES accelerate 3D, and while I currently don't have one, apparently on a 486 platform it's definitely faster at rendering 3D than the CPU in tests I've seen.

I'm really enjoying your latest videos, the topics have been well thought and well researched. Also your videos have gained more personality since you started appearing on camera. Well done!

This is pretty funny. I litterally found my s3 64 today and you post a video about it HAHA!

Very interesting!

My first video card! There were so many video manufacturers back then--it was easy to be confused. Then 3DFX ended all the confusion haha.

"This is borderline getting into the territory where you could say it's playable." Glowing endorsement there. LOL.

Supposedly the variant of the ViRGE that is best for OC'ing is a ViRGE DX/GX with fast EDO ram., in my case a STB Nitro 3D I got for stupid cheap on ebay. The main issue with it is the bios has a habit of nullifying your OC in DOS, so I'll have to figure out how to hack the bios for more speed once I've figured out how much headroom the chip has using Powerstrip in W98. The DX and GX variants actually had some improvements to the silicon and have an IPC advantage compared to the original ViRGE. I'm planning to have my Nitro 3d (ViRGE GX based, yes some of those chips were mated to EDO ram) with 35ns ram stock that I'm planning to send off to get swapped out for 25ns ram (not comfortable with smd stuff) and see how far I can OC it. Basically maximized compatibility and power for S3D games without as much monkeying around with patches and hacks like you'd have to do with a GX2. Now if you were willing so pop off the stock SGRAM on a GX2 and solder on some faster chips you might get some more speed assuming the silicon had some headrroom, but the GX2's compatibility with some S3D games is somewhat iffy. May as well just go full hacker and get one of the Trio3D cards that still had S3D support in the silicon. It's supposedly more advanced than the GX2. I already have a Rage XL for ATICIF, next will ne hunting down a Rendition Verite and I'll have reasonably fast examples of 3 out of 4 early Voodoo alternatives with a decent sized libraries. I'd love a PowerSGL card but those are obnoxiously priced.

"Terminal Velocity"! Yes! 🙌😀

My job money as kid were enough to by one magazine a mount and I am glad I always bought a gaming magazine instead of PC hardware magazine.

Interesting benchmark :)

When I was a kid we had a Cyrix processor and an S3 Virge. It was a tough time

I didn't have the S3 Virge, but had a similar experience with the Ati Rage IIc 4mb back in 1998. It made things prettier (even did 32bit) but was painfully slow... good thing I bought two used Voodoo 2 cards in SLI ;) back then.

I seem to remember certain games with S3 specific drivers did actually run OK. A racing game called Motorhead springs to mind.

I see this as 320x240 graphics card. Anything beyond this resolution was really hard for any computer during that time because of low amount of VRAM and other resources. One suggestion of graphics card to test in the future: Trident Blade3D 9880 8MB AGP

Your videos always bring great memories back. I remember skipping the S3 Virge (I have a couple now, gifts from friends cleaning attics), but I remember very well that Diamond Monster 3D shown in your magazine. I sold it as needed the money for the next one, and decades later is the one thing I regret more losing. That card just blew my mind when I was lucky enough to get one, it was a big leap in visual quality moving from 2D render. Funny thing, I also had the Matrox Mystique shown in the advert, and that one I kept as it lost value quite more than the Vodoo. I still have it in its original box whit the daughter card expansion to edit video. It was very very bad gaming card, totally dissapointing, but pretty decent in 2D, as a nice poor-man's Matrox Millenium and a fair companion for the Voodoo. I have nowadays a Creative Voodoo Banshee, also a gift, and it lacks the charm and memories of that monster 3D, with the funny VGA chain-connection, but is a way more poerful device and Tomb Raider looks awesome. It is an absolute joy to watch (too bad my muscle memory for that game is long time lost). Thanks for the video and the memories. Happy new year!

I had one of these in my first custom built pc, got it swapped out within days, true bilge!

Love this retro stuff! Excellent video! I did the same with my Trident 9680 (upgraded VRAM) to get higher res and fps on Win and Duke3D. Then I bought a Trident Blade 3D which was really good for the price, I could even play Quake 3 at 640x480 at 15 fps!

400х300 is my go-to resolution for low power cards like this

its good that you are summing up the timeline and pricing. i had a bunch of ati cards, and some s3. had most of the riva variants. the first voodoo i bought...was surreal. nothing was close at the time. but that quickly was caught up quick. i have to give nvidia credit for the first transform/shading/lighting gpu, but i rocked early..... i forget the model. cost me 3 paychecks at the time. ati still i think, far cry ran like glass on it. water effects were unmatched by my geforce cards on my athlon at the time.

I remember trying out the demo of Tomb raider III, and it ran about this well on a k6 board’s SiS video. Never tried it with our eventual Rage 128 Pro 16MB PCI.

Great to watch while testing some very cheap GeForce4 MX 440 :P Keep up the great work, informative and fun as always.

It should be noted that the S3 Virge uses 16-bit color. This requires 2 bytes per pixel, instead of 1 byte for 8-bit color. In such a case, even a 512x384 framebuffer is 30% larger than a 640x480 framebuffer in software mode. I would say that the S3 Virge should achieve at least 300% better performance compared to a 133-200 MHz CPU if every S3 effect was replicated in software rendering. The S3 Virge was somewhere in between the PS1 and N64, much closer to the N64 than the PS1. However, it never had a chance to shine, since 3DFX and other 3D accelerators arrived and CPUs were improving rapidly, going from 100 MHz to 1000 MHz in just a few years.

My first PC in the 90's was built by a guy in town and had this card. I was mad because I could not play any 3D game, they would not open stating that some DLL was missing, so I always assumed all I needed was a different / new card. I'm now thinking all it was missing were appropriate drivers, and we had no internet to check at th time.

I used to have a S3 ViRGE! card back in the day. Luckily for me for a very, very short period of time 😂. Oh, it was so long ago. Not really sure what memory capacity it had, but I clearly remember, I was not satisfied with the card's performance to say the least. I swapped it for a GeForce 2 as soon as I got the money. It was awesome 🤘🤘! Thanks for reviving my memories, Phil 😉👍!

Finally, I can fully agree with the video :) This is how we used these cards back in the day. A typical resolution was 400x300 and 512x384. There were games with a very optimized software renderer but plenty of games used the internal Direct3D software renderer which was not very fast (and often limited to 320x240 only). In such cases, it could be better to use the Virge for acceleration. However, it is true that the original Virge core (325, and VX which is the same in terms of 3D) is not very good. DX/GX improved the texturing performance significantly (perspective correction done in parallel). Together with a fast CPU (which is any Pentium II), you could play a lot of games. Some of them in 640x480. I hope you will find a good Virge DX/GX. There are anemic 45MHz ones with slow RAM (no room for overclocking) and very fast 75MHz ones (lite STB Nitro 3D) which can be typically overclocked to at least 83MHz (RAM is always the limit). If equipped with EDO RAM, 83MHz is comparable to a 100MHz GX2 (SDRAM). SDRAM being slower on Virge does not seem intuitive but it is connected with the inefficient use of it by the Virge core (no internal cache).

Always wondered about that card.

I used S3 virge DX for a short time in1998. As i remember, there was one game run smoothly with my Pentium 100mhz setup. It is the Moto Racer. This game run without stutter in both hardware 3d and software render mode.

that card does pretty well for what it is

I'm going to have to try out some software rendered gaming with my Athlon 64 x2. I didn't realize you could get that smooth of performance. The unfiltered textures have a bit of charm to them in this video, much like the look the PS1 versus the "muddy" N64 textures.

Very interresting card to me, I think it was my first gpu because I got a S3 CD-Rom laying around with TerminalVelocity and Descent II probably sold with it and the games can only run with S3 card installed (I tried just in case). I suspect these games version were highly optimised to give better performance. Cool video as always 😌!

The first time I saw what accelerated graphics with filtered textures looked like was on S3Virge at my friend's house around 1997. He owned a P166MMX with S3 Virge. And it was in the Monster Truck Madness game. It was impossible to play because the S3 Virge was too slow, but it gave a foretaste of what you could see in real accelerators like Voodoo.

Thanks for the video! Still have my Elsa Victory 3D with the pre-installed 4MB. I had the 2MB version on loan for a short while as the 4MB one wasn't available at launch. Yes, I or rather my parents bought me the 4MB version for 550 DM back then... Never bought something without reading a review again after that experience. I'll have to check if the card still works, only missing a board and case for the 200MMX I still have from that time.

Daym I love Descent / Descent 2 I need to go play them now.

From what I remember in using this graphics card and and research I've done from other people using it what made these somewhat popular in Niche groups was the fact that they had some of the sharpest VGA output you could get at the time which especially once the price dropped made them pretty desirable companion cards for 3D FX cards

This "3D Deccelerator" was my very first upgrade on my first PC (Pentium 133). It replaced the non 3D Trio 64+ also from S3. It was kind of a "short filler" until the Voodoo1 became affordable for me at the end of the 90s. The 2D performance & compatibility of both S3 cards was outstanding but the 3D concept of S3 was outdated already the day it was released... but their chips are still very common on mainboards from that era. "Danke für die Zeit die ich Ihnen gestohlen habe." ❤

I didn't know about the double-scan, but 512x384 used to be my favourite resolution. I was writing software rendering code in the late 90s/early 2000s, and my code was nowhere fast enough for acceptable performance in 640x480, but it was usually good enough in 512x384, and it looked a lot better than 320x240. I also went down to 400x300 when I was desperate, but that wasn't universally supported, and it didn't look much better than 320x240 anyway...

Hey Phil! Thanks for your continued support of the retro PC scene! I wish you a perfect new year. Now, I don't think if someone already said that, but the S3 Virge is a 1995 card and the Athlon 64 is a CPU from 2003. This test is kinda pointless, because the CPU is many times faster than whatever else that was combined with the GPU around its release. Running the games through the Virge will be absolutely worse, way worse than any software render. So, I don't got it. I was more interested on the newer GOTEK floppy disc emulator device. Maybe you could talk about it on a future video. Thanks again for the countless videos and tools that you have made for the retro PC scene.

Love this video and the goal of extracting every bit of performance out of the ViRGE! It might not be anybody's first choice of GPU (except maybe as a 2D card paired with a Voodoo), but I know there are many late 90s and early 00s laptops with S3 graphics inside, and it's very useful to know the limits of what can or can't run at a playable framerate! Am also curious about how the best S3 laptop chips and some of the early mobile ATI Rage/Radeon cards performed, can't find much information about those beyond "they are slow, don't use them." I've got a few laptops from that era, mostly ThinkPads. Haven't spent the time testing them yet, need to find the motivation to tinker with them again...

If you want to overclock that vga card, at least You need to put a fan and heatsink on top of its vga chip.

I had a 2 or 3Mb card of that some years ago in my youth. it was so cool and i liked it because driver support seemed most stable of all my various cards at the time.. sad to see that i gave myself worse gpu performance, but eh. tech was amazingly moving fastback then in my eyes :D

Our computer from January of 97 had one of these. Paried with 166mmx

Virge/DX was my first 3D card. Mostly used maximum resolution 400x300, but usually even lower. Ive got later update to 4MB as well, only one noticeable usefull difference was to be able enable space textures in wing commander phophecy, so space looked much better.

this little chip did some amazing stuff in K6-2 laptops. s3 Verge 6mb version

I think people nowdays get S3 Virge wrong with that "3D accelerator" thing. Back in the day, nobody really considered this card a 3D accelerator. After a few years, its was a great cheap 2D card to add Voodoo or Voodoo2 to. It was great for 2D games and it came with 4MB (unlike S3 Trio) which was great for Windows color depth thing, because at that time monitors were slowly getting bigger and supported better resolutions in usable modes (non-interlaced).

S3 Virge. The beloved 3D decelerator 😁 At least we had filtered textures. Terminal Velocity was great. Wasn't there an unofficial sequel? Fury something? edit: Fury ³ from the same developer

I remember being foold, I had a mach64 and wanted to try to upgrade it so I bought a diamond stealth 3d 2000. By its name I thought it was a good card but i didnt noticed a single change.

Happy Friday Phil!

I remember S3 cards needing a color remap TSR in the autoexec when combined with voodoo cards. I remember having issues with a friends PC not being able to load the TSR and have enough base memory for DOS games using 3Dfx.

In the days this card was in my clone pc paired with a voodoo 2 and a 486dx4-100. Still have that setup but i'm using an Amd 5x86@133 Mhz and the voodoo 2 is long gone since I use it for dos gaming now. The windows stuff I play on my p2-333mhz (although it does all dos stuff too).

Even though it's often times not thought of fondly due to it's anemic 3D capabilities I still have fond memories of the S3 ViRGE based Diamond Stealth 3D card I owned back in those days. I had the 4MB version in my AMD K5 and later K6 based PC back then. For 2D DOS and Windows gaming it was a fantastic card at the time. The card didn't seem to mind running the PCI bus way out of spec by utilizing the 83 MHz FSB on the Megatrends HX83 mainboard I had in that machine. The ViRGE served me well until I replaced it with a Voodoo Banshee in late 1998.

I never had an S3, but seen it other systems over the years when upgrading. I had the Diamond Monster 3D back in the day. I never realized how expensive it was. When I wanted to spend my chore money on a GPU my dad had stepped in and bought it for me. I knew it was pricey because of that, but wow...16MB version at that. Also, the pamphlet in the box was advertising something totally new and unique at the time. The Diamond RIO. A compact digital MP3 player, the first of it's kind. It probably won't catch on, right? ;)

The ability to upgrade the video memory sure feels like something that should have stuck around even now, especially with how new game releases make it seem like we're going to need to install an SSD just to run the game without it choking on texture packs. Too bad neither of the existing gpu makers will allow that.

Hi Phill. I've got a game to recommend: Viper Racing. I played a lot this game, the car model gets deformed everytime you have an accident and it was very realistic to me at that time. I used to run on the wrong way just to get craches :D There is also a plane that can be driven off the game field. Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

In 1998 I use my mother's office pc with pentium II 233 and S3 trio3D agp. 3d gaming performance was bad. I managed to play through Half Life on barely playable graphical settings. Since then, when I started with build my own computer I never choosed S3 cards but I pick up GeForce 2 GTS and was super happy with it. It was combined with second hand eizo CRT monitor

That was a Great review for the beloved S3 virge I wonder if the speed increases linear with the amount of the vram,i have an Stb virge with 8mb but i haven't tried it yet. I would love to see a Review about the Nvidia Nv1 performance

3:46 Very strange the Elsa card was 80 more than the Diamond Stealth 2000 despite them being the same S3 Virge. Huge price difference.

Awesome review. I'm really curious how the results of the later Virge cards will turn out. I believe the DX will reach playable levels at least on 512x384.

ha phil, so funny! i am watchin you while on toilet (yeaah, too much info but we got a laptop here) and right before I went here I was about to switch out a virge from my socket 7 system (266mmx oc) for my trusty banshee pci! I was thinking on my way upstairs if I should switch it, because I did not dive in enough in the virge lately. and now, just now you have a new video about the virge, I am so curious and what a nice coincident :D