elianda wrote:

How did you test the 2D speed of the cards?
(As a side note, 2D speed also heavily depends on the OS, f.e. from my experience 2D under NT4 is 5x to 6x faster than on Win9x)

Did you run 3DMark 99 with your Laguna?

2D speed is just my subjective opinion. This is mostly judged while I'm in Opera browsing web pages. It's 98 SE. If I have to watch it redraw the screen a lot, then it's slow. 😀 The Laguna is the slowest card I've seen in awhile. Even the V1000 is clearly faster and that says a lot. And this was all at 16-bit color depth. 24-bit was even slower, as expected.

I'm not really picky about 2D speed unless it is clearly dragging the system down and I'm watching a lot of slow redraws. In fact the only reason I started commenting on it was because the Laguna was so slow I thought I should say something.

I didn't bother with 3DMark99 because the card couldn't properly run games that are much simpler than 3DMark99. In fact it was unstable with just about everything I tried, even Jedi Knight. It also clearly is missing a number of features so I'm not sure a 3DMark99 score would mean much.

i'm shocked how many obscure cards Shadows of the Empire can work with. @_@ pcx-2 it doesn't like.

Some cool info in this thread.

Kind of a bit newer than most of what is being discussed but does anybody remember the Xabre series of cards? I owned the Xabre 400 for a while... they were terrible, they could barely outperform a Geforce 2, and had terrible texture filtering so games were a soupy mess. As soon as you turned any sort of texture filtering on everything started chugging.
They claimed to support DX8 vertex and pixel shaders but this was done in software, the only game I saw this work in was Morrowind and it was like rowing a boat through a sea of molasses when it was enabled.
They also didn't work with VIA chipsets which is how I ended up with it- a mate with a KT333 board bought it, and when it didn't work I bought it off him cheap, to upgrade my TNT2 Vanta (another dog of a card) Didn't hang on to it for long though.

Prior to the Vanta I had an S3 Virge GX which never worked properly in hardware mode. A driver update might have helped it but whenever I enabled hardware mode all the wall textures went white with a very thin strip of rainbow colours at the bottom edge- very strange. Character models seemed ok though. All the DXdiag tests were fine so I don't think it was a faulty card.

So basically I had 3 crappy cards in a row 😜

review moved to first post

leileilol wrote:

i'm shocked how many obscure cards Shadows of the Empire can work with. @_@ pcx-2 it doesn't like.

So far only the G200 and Riva 128 have worked with its fog table effects. That's the ultimate test of old 3D cards it seems. 😁

Of course Voodoo cards work fine with the game. I think it was pretty much designed for Voodoo1.

DonutKing wrote:

Kind of a bit newer than most of what is being discussed but does anybody remember the Xabre series of cards? I owned the Xabre 400 for a while... they were terrible, they could barely outperform a Geforce 2, and had terrible texture filtering so games were a soupy mess. As soon as you turned any sort of texture filtering on everything started chugging.
They claimed to support DX8 vertex and pixel shaders but this was done in software, the only game I saw this work in was Morrowind and it was like rowing a boat through a sea of molasses when it was enabled.

The SiS Xabre and XGI Volari cards are mysterious stuff to me. I've read all about them but have never even seen one for myself.

I used a SiS Mirage IGP in a notebook once. It supposedly was DirectX 8 capable but it was too slow to use it. Even with Morrowind. And this was a Athlon 64 powered machine.

elianda wrote:

[...] As for the Riva128 - yes it runs Unreal in OpenGL, not D3D. The VESA compatibility of the first Riva128 based cards was no […]
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[...]
As for the Riva128 - yes it runs Unreal in OpenGL, not D3D.
The VESA compatibility of the first Riva128 based cards was not 100% ok, but you could reflash the BIOS to a newer version.
From my experience this was one of the first cards where you could flash your graphics cards BIOS. [...]

this is very interesting (to me that is 🤣 as I use an ASUS V3000 pci on my DOS machine and have a spare ELSA victory erazor-4...) , can you share some more info on the BIOS update stuff? I did not notice any VESA bugs and I have run a bunch of classic svga resolution games.... the cards I have have VESA3.0 extensions btw

Re: Matrox G200. The latest BIOS can be found here:

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/dri … /previous/bios/

It looks like Matrox have removed a lot of these BIOS files. They used to all be on an FTP server of theirs. There were lots of different older versions. Now, it seems that only the latest versions are available. That's a pity. I remember having trouble flashing a G200 with the latest BIOS. I had to flash it "incrementally" - that is, flash it from its existing very old version to a slightly newer version, then to a newer version again, and then to the final version.

@keropi: This was very long ago and I can hardly remember what was fixed. My original Erazor was delivered with BIOS 1.54.x and later ELSA released an update to 1.55. AFAIK 1.55 is also the final version. The only thing I remember that it had something to do with VESA support. I still have the 1.54 BIOS card here, I never flashed it.
When I am back home, I can have alook in my archive for the BIOS images/update program if you are interested.

While I was looking in the net, I found this:
http://home.arcor.de/g.s/dostools.htm
There is a program called fastvga.com and v1550.com that should increase the BIOS performance by a 300%. I'am quite curious what it does and if this speed gain is real.
A Riva128 is already a fast card for DOS, with a 300% increase it would probably outperform everything else.

@swaaye: Do you have a Permedia2 card to test ? I had one some time ago, but had to sold it. Also, sorry for repeating my last question, but do you know if a Creative Graphics Blaster Eclipse 3D card is a Laguna 3D one ? All I know is the name, as there is no pictures of it nor I can see the creative internal model name (CTxxxx). Thanks.

unmei220 wrote:

@swaaye: Do you have a Permedia2 card to test ? I had one some time ago, but had to sold it. Also, sorry for repeating my last question, but do you know if a Creative Graphics Blaster Eclipse 3D card is a Laguna 3D one ? All I know is the name, as there is no pictures of it nor I can see the creative internal model name (CTxxxx). Thanks.

The Graphics Blaster Exxtreme (if that's what you mean) is a Permedia 2 card.

I don't have any 3DLabs boards at all unfortunately....

@unmei220: according to google Creative Graphics Blaster Eclipse 3d is models CT6510 and CT6511.

http://www.yjfy.com/C/Creative/video/Creative.htm
Graphics Blaster 3D CT6381 4MB Cirrus CL-GD5464
Graphics Blaster MA302 PCI CT6320 2MB RAMBUS Cirrus CL-GD5462 (OEM)
Graphics Blaster MA334 PCI CT6381 4MB RAMBUS CL-GD5464
Graphics Blaster MA202 PCI CT6330 2MB EDORAM Cirrus CL-GD5446 (OEM)
Graphics Blaster MA201 PCI CT6331 1MB EDORAM Cirrus CL-GD5446 (OEM)
Graphics Blaster Eclipse AGP CT6510 4MB RAMBUS Cirrus CL-GD5465
Graphics Blaster Eclipse PCI CT6511 4MB RAMBUS Cirrus CL-GD5464

It sounds like the same card as I have.

swaaye: you fucking rock man ! or as the Scouse people says it, you are the dogs bollocks 😀

@elianda:

I will check my elsa card and let you know via PM ... turns out right now I am using an STB velocity riva128 with 1.81 BIOS...

keropi wrote:

@elianda:

I will check my elsa card and let you know via PM ... turns out right now I am using an STB velocity riva128 with 1.81 BIOS...

So here we go, several BIOS versions for Elsa Victory Erazor
1.47.01
1.54.01
1.55.00

Please also check the readme's and take usual care when flashing.

thanks elianda!!!!

Ok I tested the Laguna 3D AGP.
The card itself is more or less DirectX5 compliant.

3DMark 99 Max gives a score of 963 on a P3 933 MHz @ 640x480x16bit.
I have seen the texture bending too.
A missing feature is Multiplicative Alpha Blending, so every transparent texture is opaque.
2 MB Texture rendering speed is 24.9 fps
Fillrate about 11.4 MTexels/s
Overall the Benchmark does not show artifacts except of slight texture bending sometimes.
The Demo however has this bending effect stronger and especially in the room with the water some textures are painted only partially.

at 800x600x16Bit I get 523 3DMarks.
Fillrate about 10.3 MTexels/s
2 MB Texture rendering speed is 13.5 fps

Now 3DMark2000 640x480x16Bit Double Buffering
Helicopter shows ok, except the lightmaps for the tank shadows and explosions which are non-transparent white squares.
A slight dithering is visible in the whole scene, except the helicopter itself.
Adventure looks like all lightmaps are missing and only the first texture is rendered, everything has the same brightness.
409 3DMarks

Final Reality 1.0 OEM
D3D_INVALIDPIXELFORMAT

Forsaken runs fine, no graphical glitches visible, between 30 and 20 fps.

Quake2 OpenGL driver falls back to software mode.

Tomb Raider 2 shows this kind of slight texture 'pumping' effect and some strong edge aliasing, but runs good at 30 to 15 fps.

Drakan 640x480x16Bit max. setting - about 4 fps, sometimes world textures get greyish. Also multiplicative blended textures are opaque.
No Shadows, Detail textures Off, High Texture Quality about 7fps and no texture errors visible anymore.

installed also Fraps 1.8d but it requires DX 8.1 to get DInput for Keys. So I will do screenshots later.

swaaye wrote:

Matrox G200 (1998) Matrox Millennium G200 8MB SGRAM AGP […]
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Matrox G200 (1998)
Matrox Millennium G200 8MB SGRAM AGP

3D
-OpenGL is pretty good in its final incarnation but Quake 2 lacks transparent water

Many years ago, I posted about that G200 transparency bug on Matrox tech support forum, a bug report was raised and problem was eventually fixed, but oddly enough, Matrox only released the updated G200 OpenGL ICD inside G400 Windows XP driver. You can still download xp2k_596_004.exe archive, expand g200icd.dll file and use it under Windows 95, 98, 2K and XP with fixed transparency and other improvements.

elianda wrote:

So here we go, several BIOS versions for Elsa Victory Erazor 1.47.01 1.54.01 1.55.00 […]
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keropi wrote:

@elianda:

I will check my elsa card and let you know via PM ... turns out right now I am using an STB velocity riva128 with 1.81 BIOS...

So here we go, several BIOS versions for Elsa Victory Erazor
1.47.01
1.54.01
1.55.00

Please also check the readme's and take usual care when flashing.

I flashed my elsa card, it was 1.47.01 😊 , did some quick test I saw no performance gain... also the speedup progs posted before had no impact at all, maybe they are for pentiumII machines...

as a sidenote I see now my STB card is an AGP one... man my memory is too weak! 😵