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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

My ideal card would have an accel X server, be fast, work with svgalib, 
have at least 2M RAM, work with all my monitors, and be compatible with a 
Hercules Graphics card in the same computer.  Unfortunately all my cards 
seem rather dependent on both hardware and software.

Hardware:

1.  AGP cards (S3 Trio3D with 4M RAM) - not compatible with Hercules card.  
It must use the same area of ROM or something.

2.  Speed.  Most of our cards ran at 112K in an Intel P133 computer.
We tested with whatvga2, a freeware diagnostic program for DOS (which 
won't work at all with Tseng cards or one of our Cirrus cards, and 
displays some modes with 16M colors as greyscale tho they work in 
programs).  In the AMD K6-300 they ran at 69-70K.  The Diamond Stealht 
with paper pasted over the video chip ran at 53/47K.  The Trident and 
Tseng, oddlu enough, were much faster in the AMD - up from 77K to 142K for 
the Tseng and 135K for the Trident. 

The Tseng, with 2M RAM, only uses 1M of it in VESA mode (fewer colors).

3.  Monitor.  We have two monitors that won't display more than 800 res 
with S3 cards but will do 1024 or 1280 with Trident card.  (NCR and 
Microscan).  The S3 cards all display 1280 on a small Compaq, but this 
monitor will only do up to 800 or 1024 with Trio#d, ATI Mach64, the 
Trident Providia, 1 of our 2 Alliance and 2 of our Cirrus cards.  I 
eventually figured out that it works with only certain modes (107-114 on 
the newer cards, 58-71 on the older cards but possibly not for 320 res) 
and will NOT work with 100-107 modes.  So you need to match the card to 
the monitor.  One card will display the higher resolutions at higher but 
not lower numbers of colors (32K-16M works okay, 16 colors does not)

The older cards are more likely to use the resolutions that work with our 
Compaq, for instance two Cirrus cards that do 1280 work at 1280, but one 
that does 1600 won't work even at 1152.


Software
1.  SVGAlib programs.
a.  Ghostscfipt - Trident and Tseng will do 255 colors with DOS ghoscript 
but NONE of our cards will do lvga256 with Linux ghostscript for console.
I have not tried xpdf or ghostview with them.
b.  Seejpeg won't display with most of our cards.  It DOES work with ALL 
the S3 cards (which all also do 1600), with  the newere Aliiance (that 
does 1600), with three Cirrsu cards (but the newest one does blu jpegs), 
and it will display gifs but not jpegs with the Tseng.  Other cards give 
messages about not finding any modes for 256 colors.

2.  X servers - accel servers availalbe for ATI Mach 64 and for some of
the S3 card - S3 801/805 (older, 1M), probably Trio32 (?), and according
to Steven for Trio64(V+) but I just got error messages, possibly because
of my monitor settings not handling the video card mode output.
Some Virge cards work with s3v but mine did not  The other S3 cards use 
Xsvga which I have no got to work with truecolor.

3.  Xvesa -xfbdev tinyX  and Kdrive
Kdrive requires Vesa 1.2 and the others VESa 2.0. I have not got this 
working yet.  VESA 2.0 cards are my AGP Trio3d, Trio64Virge, and the 
unknown Diamond Stealth card that do 1600 and have 4M RAM.

Dates

They are probably the newest cards but are not dated.  The dated cards are 
the Trident and Tseng (1996) and Aliiance (1995 and 1994).  The older 
cards (of the Cirrus and Aliiance) are more likely to work better with 
older monitors at the higher reoslutions.


I will probably put a Trident or a Tseng in the AMD and an S3 in the
second computer for my office so that I can have the advantages of speed
in one computter (and colors in PDF files without needing to use the very
slow xpdf - it takes 5 sec to display each page or 10 sec to magnify it at
133MHz, when gs takes 2 sec on a 486).  The S3 Trio64 should give
Truecolor in linux (without learning frame buffers) and work on different
monitors.  It will take some exeprimenting to get it all right.  I have
two offices with two comptuers each.  Our next computer is a Celeron
(which came with very slow SiS onboard video - 15K) and then a Cyrix and
an older Intel.

Let me know if you want any model numbers off my card or a list of modes 
supported by anything I own.  

Someone just gave us yet another 56K Winmodem ;=(.  USR, which is listed 
at the linmodem site as not having ANY linux support.

Sindi Keesan