This topic may answer your question:

Fastest DOS VLB Graphics card ever?

I personally run an ET4000W32/p with 2MB RAM, its a pretty good card for gaming - good performance and compatibility.

I would personally try to find a card based on the s3 vision864 chip, but they are a bit expensive and hard to find.

jaqie wrote:

I would personally try to find a card based on the s3 vision864 chip, but they are a bit expensive and hard to find.

I think I had one of these. Best card I ever had in my old 486. Diamond Stealth 2MB DRAM, most beautiful colours I've ever seen. Tried to have 2 Stealth VRAM, but they all died soon, so I stayed with the DRAM.

ATi Mach64 but good luck finding one. Mach32 is much easier to find.

Thank you all for your replies. I think I have enough information to make sure I get something decent.

I've had a VLB S3 Trio64 before.

But in my experience, a ET4000 W32/p with 2MB is faster in DOS. I even had a S3 968 w/ VRAM once and liked the ET4000 more.

GUI acceleration has a point of diminishing returns on even a 5x86 160mhz so don't get too caught up on that.

Also it would be useful to know if those cards will work stable at 50MHz. I guess that a VLB card paired with a 50 Mhz CPU (486DX@50MHz) would be faster than the same card paired with a 33 Mhz CPU (I means, a 486DX2@66 MHz)... if it runs (maybe some cheap cards will work only at 25 or 33MHz).

I have a few VLB cards to choose from and I find that the image quality and colour depth are the most important factors, particularly for a game like Dune2 which doesn't need much grunt anyway.

I use one with an ET4000AX chipset, which is actually the slowest card I own, but it looks absolutely beautiful.

The deal with 50MHz would be useful to know, though I'm planning on putting in a DX2-66 myself.

Indeed, the games I would be using this machine for would not be very demanding on it, so I agree that image quality and color depth are the best features to look for. Still have a few options to pick from.