What's the fastest video card for DOS games?

fabiobol · Post by **fabiobol** » Fri May 19, 2006 7:21 am

At the moment, I'm using an Intel 486 DX-4/100, with 40 MB RAM, 2 GB WD HDD, Sound Blaster AWE32 (very, very long!), 56K modem and a Cirrus Logic GD 5428 Vesa video Card (1 MB ). Duke Nukem 3d, using a better resolution than 320x200, runs quite slow. Big Red Racing, also, runs at very few frames per second. My question is: what video card should I choose to use these games very well? My motherboard is a Aopen Vi15G with SiS 471 chipset, and doesn't support any PCI at all. So I must choose a VESA card.

At home, I also have other video cards:

-Tseng ET4000 ISA 1 MB: good, but does not support over 256 colours

-Trident Super VGA 1 MB ISA: rather slow, doesn't support over 256 colours

-Realtek 256 KB of memory ISA: very slow.

What can I do?

Unknown_K · Post by **Unknown_K** » Sat May 20, 2006 12:08 am

Tseng ET4000 based VLB cards should do well in DOS games, most other accelerators were designed for Windows performance.

fabiobol · Post by **fabiobol** » Sat May 20, 2006 6:29 pm

In your opinion, is there any way to make Big Red Racing work on my DX-4?

Frenkel · Post by **Frenkel** » Sun May 21, 2006 2:51 pm

FPS per second

That's funny

.

fabiobol · Post by **fabiobol** » Sun May 21, 2006 3:28 pm

Try to understand me: I'm italian, my English is not as good as I wanted... I'm sorry. I edit the message.

dr_st · Post by **dr_st** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 4:22 am

I think that on a 486, the CPU will bottleneck more than the video card.

fabiobol · Post by **fabiobol** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 4:29 am

I tried with a PCI-Motherboard an I put inside a Matrox Millennium PCI with 4 MB of memory... the results were better, but Big Red Racing was still very slow. Then I tried with a S3 Trio 64V+ with 2 MB and the games ran quite well but, again, Big Red Racing was quite slow. The minimum requirements say: 486DX2/66 MHz CPU; 8 MB RAM, 512 K video card (VGA). I have a system much better: 486DX4/100 MHz; 32 MB RAM; 2 MB video Card... but some games don't run well.
If I put a Matrox G200 PCI? How does it work in 2-d?

KAN · Post by **KAN** » Fri Jun 30, 2006 7:40 am

dr_st wrote:I think that on a 486, the CPU will bottleneck more than the video card.

True. For high-res, texture mapped DOS games like Jane's ATF, Privateer 2, or Duke Nukem 3D (in high res), CPU matters more than video card.

It's better for you to replace your motherboard and CPU into an Intel 400BX and Pentium III. An 440BX motherboard still has at least an ISA slot, so you can still put your ISA soundcard (like SB AWE32) on it, thus, getting sound when booting in pure DOS. If you have such configuration, video card won't matter anymore to play DOS games.

wadeo999 · Post by **wadeo999** » Tue Sep 12, 2006 7:27 am

I use the 3DLABS Permedia 8mb card its really good for dos games.