TVGA 8900 - high-color (65,536) display-mode support, 1MB framebuffer
8900B (up to 1MB)
8900C (up to 1MB, SVGA, ISA)
8900CL (up to 2MB, SVGA, ISA/VLB. Slightly faster than earlier 8900 cards)
8900D (up to 2MB, 8900CL w/ bugs corrected)
8900DR (SVGA, ISA, max 1MB)
TVGA 9000 - first integrated (VGA+RAMDAC) VGA chipset
A regular Trident based card that probably found it's way in an affordable PC in 1993. For lower end systems (i.e. 386SX 33MHz) this card works fine.
I included benchmarks that I ran on a Pentium 100. The Pentium 100 is blazing fast in the time-frame of the Trident 8900CL, however, this will indicate how much difference between ISA cards exist. After all we can practically consider that the Pentium 100 is not really a limiting factor.
Using Doom the 8900CL scores 16.15 FPS whereas the Diamond SpeedSTAR 24 (one of the fastest Tseng Labs ET4000AX based cards) scores about double: 32.49. That's a huge difference. Keep in mind that the same SpeedSTAR 24 scores just 6.27 in a DX2/66 system so the fast Pentium 100 shows a bigger difference than you would experience back in the day with a DX2/66. > Read more