Best SVGA card for racing sims?

I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 soon. Any advice would be appricated. Thanks Jim Harmon

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> I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good > card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ > 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any > difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 > soon. Any advice would be appricated. > Thanks > Jim Harmon

Jim, I currently run a similar setup. I have a Am486 DX4/100 w/ the Diamond Stealth 64/DRAM (2meg). It is more than enough for EGA mode. I feel that my processor is the limiting factor in ICR2 rather than the graphics card. I have heard some people claim that the DRAM is actually better for DOS games. I don't know about this myself. I too hope to upgrade to an Am5x86 myself as soon as they will sell me one at the company store! Clark

>I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good >card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ >2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any >difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 >soon. Any advice would be appricated. IMHO the Matrox Millenium is the best video card for any sim. See www.matrox.com for more info. It costs around $300 if you shop around. Tom _______________________________________________________________ Tom Weber Visit my Homepage and say Hi! http://www.icon-stl.net/~tweber _______________________________________________________________

: I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good : card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ : 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any : difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 : soon. Any advice would be appricated. : I have a DS 64w/VRAM. NASCAR works well but I don't know if it is better than a DRAM. It is more expensive; and I don't know if it would be worth the difference in price. Especially with all of the new 3D chipset video cards coming out (Video Blaster, Verge(sp?), EDGE 3D). You might want to go with the DRAM for now, hoping that the 3D cards will be out and at a good price in a year or so. BTW has anyone seen the new 3D cards? I have seen some stills that show NASCAR with incredible graphics! But you can't tell the performance from a still. Michael Lewis

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> Jim, > I currently run a similar setup. I have a Am486 DX4/100 w/ the Diamond > Stealth 64/DRAM (2meg). It is more than enough for EGA mode. I feel that my > processor is the limiting factor in ICR2 rather than the graphics card. I > have heard some people claim that the DRAM is actually better for DOS games. > I don't know about this myself. I too hope to upgrade to an Am5x86 myself as > soon as they will sell me one at the company store! > Clark

It goes like this: DRAM: you can either write or read to/from it VRAM: you can write and read to/from it at the same time So if you have 60ns DRAM and a 100ns VRAM chip, the VRAM is faster because it runs two operations at the same time. However, your video driver has to support this, so in dos based vga games the VRAM actually runs slower than the DRAM. However, indycar 2 has an independent vesa driver for running it's graphics, I personally don't know whether it supports VRAM, but since it supports several chipsets directly, I'd say it supports the VRAM used by those chipsets. Thus --> if your chipset is supported by icr2, then it probably supports your VRAM. From what i can say, my icr2 is 2x as fast as Nascar (which doesn't have an independent graphics driver) running on the same pc, and my video card uses VRAM. If I were buying a video card for icr2, I'd certainly buy one with VRAM. Tommi Pajari

> > I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good > > card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ > > 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any > > difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 > > soon. Any advice would be appricated. A Matrox Millenium with 4mb of VRAM would have quite an accepatble performance. Mark

: > : > I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good : > card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ : > 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any : > difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 : > soon. Any advice would be appricated. : I currently run a similar setup. I have a Am486 DX4/100 w/ the Diamond : Stealth 64/DRAM (2meg). It is more than enough for EGA mode. I feel that my : processor is the limiting factor in ICR2 rather than the graphics card. I : have heard some people claim that the DRAM is actually better for DOS games. : I don't know about this myself. I too hope to upgrade to an Am5x86 myself as : soon as they will sell me one at the company store! Buying a new P120 last week, the supplier described this advantage of DRAM over VRAM as being that DOS graphics (say in games) will be much quicker, but if you do lots of scrolling (plus colour work etc.) in Windows VRAM increases the speed, refresh rate and number of colours... Which is what I knew anyway, but you know what salesmen are like - can't get a word in edgeways, even to confirm the sale! :-) Thomas - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 91 Thief Lane http://www.york.ac.uk/~tgc102/ YORK * Compu$erve dropped for their lack of sense * YO1 3HT, UK "God preserve us from religious nutters!"

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>>I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good >>card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ >>2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any >>difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 >>soon. Any advice would be appricated. >IMHO the Matrox Millenium is the best video card for any sim. See >www.matrox.com for more info. It costs around $300 if you shop around. >Tom

I would just like to add the following: I have an 486DX4-100 (8 meg) with a Hercules Stingray 64/Video (1 meg DRAM) at home and a P133 (48 meg) with a Matrox Millenium (4 meg WRAM) at work. The difference in NASCAR in SVGA is minimal. If I disable the grandstands on the 486, the sim is perfectly smooth. On some games (Terminal Velocity for example) the 486 w/Herc card is smoother. Also, the Stingray is under $150. Just my experience.

Is the stingray 64 a PCI video card? What IS the fastest VL-bus card on the market... for dos performance that is?

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> : > > : > I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good > : > card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ > : > 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any > : > difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 > : > soon. Any advice would be appricated. > : I currently run a similar setup. I have a Am486 DX4/100 w/ the Diamond > : Stealth 64/DRAM (2meg). It is more than enough for EGA mode. I feel that my > : processor is the limiting factor in ICR2 rather than the graphics card. I > : have heard some people claim that the DRAM is actually better for DOS games. > : I don't know about this myself. I too hope to upgrade to an Am5x86 myself as > : soon as they will sell me one at the company store! > Buying a new P120 last week, the supplier described this advantage > of DRAM over VRAM as being that DOS graphics (say in games) will > be much quicker, but if you do lots of scrolling (plus colour > work etc.) in Windows VRAM increases the speed, refresh rate > and number of colours... > Which is what I knew anyway, but you know what salesmen are like - > can't get a word in edgeways, even to confirm the sale!

OK... So how would Win 95 handle the problem. If you run the simulation via (from) Win95 does its video drivers continue to function or does it treat the simulation as a true dos game? If the later is true then VRAM still wouldn't help in any case. ANY comments? Thanks... ______________________________________________________________________________ ................................http://www.dma.org/~wrinkled ................698 Timberwood Drive Dayton, OH 45430-1438 ..............................................(513) 427-3265 "Mulder!, Toads just fell from the sky." "I guess their parachutes didn't open." Agents Scully and Mulder... from the X-Files.

>> > I'm going to purchase a PCI video card and want to know what's a good >> > card to get. I'm currently leaning towards the Diamond Stealth 64 w/ >> > 2Meg DRAM. Is it worth the extra money to get VRAM? If it makes any >> > difference I've got a DX4/100 which I plan to upgrade to AMD 5x86/133 >> > soon. Any advice would be appricated. >A Matrox Millenium with 4mb of VRAM would have quite an accepatble performance. I have a Millenium in a P133 and a Hercules Stingray 64 in a 486DX4-100. The difference in NASCAR is minimal. If I turn the grandstand textures to auto on the 486, it is perfectly smooth. With the P133 I can max everything. Just my experience. Lee

The advantage of VRAM only become obvious when you are at high resolutions and color depths. If you are at 640x480 and 256 colors, you will not see a difference between DRAM and VRAM. At 1280x1024 and 16.7 million the difference will be night and day. I don't know what the color depth of ICR2 is so VRAM may be much better or not. Also, the video card companies tend advertise the perfomance of thier cards in Windows. Most of the PC magazines only benchmark cards in Windows now. The best Windows cards are usually not the best DOS *** cards and vise-versa. Just my experience.