Millenium 1 Dos Speed Question !

[spawn666]

sorry guys, but i need assistance. a nasty person claims that his tseng et6000 was definitely faster under dos enviroment than my lovely millenium pci 4mb.

i cannot understand, cause i played dos games with it a lot and hell this thing was fast at this times.

so, can anyone help me out ? there are several bios version, perhaps there is one who kicks ass ? man, thos wram had to be faster !

[Greebe]

the et6k based Gcards were fast in DOS. Faster than a Mill1 I cannot say, but bigger question is why is this such a concern today? Sounds to me like a pissing contest to see who has the bigger...

[Dogbert]

The tseng was a great chipset for his time but the Millenium strong point was the WRAM and superior RAMDAC (going head to head against No.9 Imagine 128) that gave unbelievable image quality @ high res on very large monitors.

[Ribbit]

Both cards were pretty damn fast as (S)VGAs. Don't know which was faster, but the ET6000 was newer. The WRAM on the Matrox would mainly have been a benefit for windowing environments - VGA speed is mainly determined by how it's implemented in the core.

Demos (of the underground, 'scene' variety - look at http://www.scene.org if you don't know what I mean) used to recommend the ET4000 for speed, then later the Millennium. Don't remember anyone recommending the ET6000, but that was probably about the time Windows was really starting to take over.

[spawn666]

thanks... i have heard the et6k was the fastest. cause it cheated in caching ...

but the information that the millenium is older is quite useful for me.

ok, nowadays its useless, but i am proud of my nearly 7 year old millenium...

[az]

The number nine imagine 128 had SEVERE problems in DOS. For instance, it only used 512k of its memory in DOS. Sad to see they're gone though.

AZ

[Ribbit]

I think that's because the boards actually had two chips - the #9 and some crappy Cirrus Logic. The #9 wasn't DOS/VGA-compatible, so in native mode (i.e. under Windows/X11/whatever) you got the Imagine chip, which was quite good, and in DOS/VGA mode you got the Cirrus, which was a dog.

[spawn666]

thx @all.

the millenium was king of the dos... at his launch...

[Rags]

Yes, the ET6000 was (and still is) the fastest dos video card.

Rags

[juizzi]

so how did you guys actually prove that et6k is better in dos
than millennium I or II, they both put as much data as the pci bus can put through into the frame buffer.. so in fact what is the thing that the et6k does better in dos?-)

[Tomasz]

The performance advantage was proven in several benchmarks. To see them you would probably have to dig up some old magazines like Computer Gaming World.

The et6000 was quite fast, but I generally avoided it since it only had a 135 MHz Ramdac and usually just came with 2MB, 4MB max (Millennium had a 220 MHz Ramdac and supported upto 8MB).