Venus Virge GX / ACER OPEN PT75

Technical details
Name: Venus Virge GX
Company: AOpen
Chipset: S3 ViRGE 86C385 at 55 MHz
Bus: PCI
RAM: 2+2 MB SGRAM 10ns 64 bit at 75 MHz
DAC: integrated 170 MHz 8/15/16/24/32 bit
Connectors: VGA, VESA
PCI-ID: VENDOR 5333 DEVICE 8A01
FCC-ID: ?
Manufactured: 1997


This chipset has the ViRGE On Board - (ViRGE = Virtual Reality Graphics Engine) one of the first cards for PC with 3D acceleration features in hardware. Still, it was often slower than rendering scenes by software rendering with the CPU. So it was soon nicknamed "3D decelerator". S3 introduced their own graphics API for 3D acceleration called S3D with a few games supporting it (Tomb Raider, Descent II, Terminal Velocity, Mech Warrior 2, ...) The S3 ViRGE/GX series incorporates the same 2D graphics core as the S3 Trio64V2. The memory expansion adds 2 MB SGRAM to the 2 MB SGRAM on the main card. The S3 ViRGE/GX supports SD-/SG- and EDO-RAM but is not faster than a S3 ViRGE/DX at the same clock.

S3 Drivers
VESA Info
Specification table at Wikipedia
Detailed review at Vintage 3D
archived S3 ViRGE/GX product overview
S3 VBE20 3.18 driver and speed tool