Ltning<b>Welcome to my mini ISA VGA shootout!</b><br><i>TL;DR: ISA Matrox cards are really, really slow in DOS.</i><br><br>I recently built an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_(original)" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">original Pentium</a> 60MHz system, built on an <a href="https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ecs-si5pi-aio-rev-1-1" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ECS</a> motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A <a href="https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/matrox-mga-ultima-impression" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Matrox MGA Impression</a> ISA card. And since most of my builds are "open builds" and therefore easily accessible, that machine got the pleasure of becoming the test bench for the Matrox.<br><br>As already revealed, the Matrox performs atrociously bad. So bad, in fact, that I had to test a couple other ISA cards to make sure it wasn't a system issue. I used my go-to benchmarking tool <a href="https://weirdr.net/snac?t=3dbench" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#3DBench</a> from <a href="https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack</a>. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..<br><br>And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:<br>- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI <a href="https://theretroweb.com/chips/3857" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">S3 Virge/DX</a> based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable <b>48.2</b><br>- The low-end <a href="https://theretroweb.com/chips/4088" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Trident TVGA9000C</a> with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty <b>14.2</b><br>- The mid-range <a href="https://theretroweb.com/chips/3900" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422</a> with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, know for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable <b>24.7</b><br>- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping <b>10.9</b>!<br><br>I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with <a href="https://weirdr.net/snac?t=os2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#OS2</a> anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)<br><br><a href="https://weirdr.net/snac?t=retrocomputing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#RetroComputing</a> <a href="https://weirdr.net/snac?t=benchmarks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Benchmarks</a> <a href="https://weirdr.net/snac?t=vga" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#VGA</a> <a href="https://weirdr.net/snac?t=slowvga" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SlowVGA</a><br>