I recently built an original Pentium 60MHz system, built on an ECS motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A Matrox MGA Impression 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.

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 #3DBench from Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..

And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, known for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!

I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)

#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA

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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result