S3 ViRGE DX

A fairly regular S3 Virge DX with 1MB RAM fitted. Often you see these cards with 2MB RAM so they can run higher resolutions and more colors in Windows 95. With 1MB you can only get up to 800x600 with 16-bit colors or 1024x768 with 256 colors. An additional megabyte will allow you to run 800x600 in true colors or 1024x768 in 16-bit color.

For games it doesn't really matter: DOS games generally don't need that much RAM and Direct3D games are slow on the S3 Virge anyway.

The extra memory doesn't increase performance. I have benchmarked this card and got almost identical results to this S3 Virge DX 2MB. Doom is just one realtic slower (about 0.30 FPS) and it's slightly slower in throwing ASCII characters around in SySCHK and scores slightly less on memory bandwidth.

In summary these cards are nice for Pentium-class systems to run DOS-games or alongside a 3Dfx Voodoo or PowerVR if you have a decent Pentium MMX .