Name: Diamond Viper VLB: $550 Windows 3.1 Accelerator Card
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:42:31.000Z
Duration: 15 min 45 s
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And today I felt like playing around with some early 90s graphics cards,

with this Diamond Viper VLB being my primary inspiration for doing so.

Lately I’ve been benchmarking the LGR Woodgrain 486 PC,

which really just means screwing around with random parts and playing Duke Nukem 3D.

Most recently, I spent some time upgrading the 66 megahertz 486 CPU with an 83 megahertz

Pentium Overdrive, the results of which can be seen in a previous LGR episode.

But I’ve also been meaning try some different VESA Local Bus video adapters, something besides

the 1 megabyte Diamond SpeedStar Pro VLB I have in there right now.

So while I was sorting through some random parts the other week, I scrounged up a Diamond

Viper VLB revision E3 I’d never used before and didn’t know anything about.

Turns out this two megabyte card cost a whopping $549/$985 when it hit store shelves in 1993,

nearly a thousand bucks adjusted for inflation decades later.

With the main selling point being that it uses a Weitek Power 9000.

Either way-tech, the Power 9000 was a beastly graphics chip back then, hailed as the world’s

fastest user interface controller when it released in the latter half of 1992.

And I mean, depending on your needs, it was!

Two whole megabytes of VRAM, a 32-bit 33 megahertz core,

and 24-bit true color graphics in Windows 3.1?

Not to mention resolutions up to 1280x1024 at a 74 hertz vertical refresh rate

Here’s the thing about these “graphics accelerators” from the early 90s:

exactly what they’re designed to accelerate varies wildly from card to card.

And in the case of the Viper VLB, the Power 9000 chip is designed to accelerate 2D graphical

user interfaces, specifically Windows 3.1.

If you want smoother DOS games, the on-board VGA chip matters a whole lot more.

And the Oak Technology 087X sucks when it comes to SVGA performance in DOS games,

running only an 8-bit data path and using its own separate memory.

Taking a look at the box for the card confirms this, with all the marketing centered around

While it does have drivers and BIOS extensions for Super VGA in DOS, the main focus was all

about providing a workstation-like experience on a Windows PC.

And I mean hey, not what I expected but that’s still pretty awesome,

so I’m curious enough to give it a shot.

Even though I don’t think we’ll be seeing much improvement in DOS compared to my SpeedStar

Pro card with its Cirrus Logic GD5428 chipset.

Gotta know for sure though, so let’s get the software and drivers installed

and see what we can do with the Diamond Viper VLB!

I’ve gone ahead and taken care of the driver installation,

and at this point nothing looks any different.

However, typing in VPRMODE will bring up the Viper VLB setup program,

letting you change around all sorts of nifty things.

For starters, you can increase the default DOS text mode from the typical 80 columns

Something I’ve seen supported on programs like WordPerfect before, but guess I never

really thought to see if this was possible on DOS 6.22 before, but I’ve always liked

the look of 132 column terminals in UNIX-based operating systems, so this is pretty awesome.

VPRMODE also comes with monitor refresh rate options, providing presets for higher-res

displays of the time and the ability to customize as needed.

You also get a set of monochrome and color graphics tests, handy for seeing what the

card can do and adjusting your monitor’s display settings for each mode.

The VPRMODE program is also used to enable the Diamond Viper’s BIOS extensions, otherwise

VESA-compatible programs won’t know how to address it.

If you’ve ever seen or used the UniVBE program in certain DOS games, yeah.

That’s a universal driver that works with all sorts of VESA cards, but the Viper VLB

has its own extensions accomplishing the same thing.

Which means we can jump into some benchmarks and games!

And we’re gonna start with one of the former, the Superscape VGA Benchmark.

We ran this before when I upgraded this machine from a 486 to a Pentium Overdrive, and the

result was 55.7 with the SpeedStar Pro VLB card I had in here before.

And whadduya know, the Viper VLB is worse here, coming in at only 32.5.

That Oak VGA chip though, what’re ya gonna do.

Let’s try something running in VESA mode though: Duke 3D, running at 640x480 resolution.

This doesn’t have a benchmarking mode unfortunately, but we can run the two side by side at least.

The tiny number at the top left of each capture is the current framerate and well, there’s

It seems that the Viper draws a frame or two more at any given time than the SpeedStar

Pro, but it’s still a negligible difference and without a proper benchmark I can’t declare

precisely anything precise with precision.

I’d run the Quake timedemo but for some reason, the newer versions of the game all

crash on this system, and older versions that do run

don’t show the resulting benchmark stats.

Oh well, at least SimCity 2000 Special Edition works fantastically!

And I mean, it did already with the other card so that’s not saying much, but still.

It’s at least not any worse and works without a hitch using the card’s own BIOS extensions,

something I haven’t always had success with using other VLB video adapters.

The monster’s dropping down wind power plants

instead of tossing out trees or just zapping the ground.

But yeah, as anticipated, when it comes to DOS gaming

everything running in VESA mode runs about the same or slightly better.

And just about everything else that runs using regular old VGA performs notably worse,

again due to that Oak VGA chipset being used with only 256K of video RAM.

So let’s put that P9000 to use instead and get this going with Windows 3.1 as nature intended.

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Diamond Viper VLB: $550 Windows 3.1 Accelerator Card

stuff

absolutely

massive

awesome