Biostar S3 ViRGE
| Technical details | |
| Name: | ? |
| Company: | Biostar Microtech Int'l Corp |
| Chipset: | S3 ViRGE 86C325 at 50 MHz |
| Bus: | PCI |
| RAM: | 4 MB EDO DRAM 40ns 64 bit at 50 MHz |
| DAC: | integrated 135 MHz 8/15/16/24/32 bit |
| Connectors: | VGA, VESA |
| PCI-ID: | VENDOR 5333 DEVICE 5631 |
| FCC-ID: | I27MM-VS03A |
| Manufactured: | 1996 |
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 series incorporates the same 2D graphics core as the S3 Trio64. 2D GUI acceleration works up to 1280x1024 256 colors @ 75 Hz
S3 Drivers
VESA Info
Specification table at Wikipedia
Detailed review at Vintage 3D
S3 VBE20 3.18 driver and speed tool
