How Duke Nukem II’s parallax scrolling worked
Hmm, maybe my memory is failing me, but VLB went from 0 to 100% on 486 motherboards pretty much overnight. The ISA bus limits (and hence EISA) were well known, and most of the SVGA cards being sold in the early 1990&#x27;s (like those cirrus logic&#x27;s) were &quot;accelerated&quot; to compensate for the lack of ISA bandwidth. AKA, they had blit engines, hw cursors, line drawing, etc, and windows drivers to utilize that functionality. I&#x27;m fairly certain, although to lazy to dig up the tech manual for them that the blit functionality included alpha channels. Given that 486&#x27;s themselves were considered high end, I frankly never remember seeing one with an 8 bit EGA card, even 386&#x27;s usually in the late 80&#x27;s early 1990&#x27;s were shipping with 16-bit (S)VGA cards because the 3rd party cards were fairly inexpensive. While EGA lived on in lots of games because it had some convenient modes, actual EGA cards were also fairly short lived in that little window before VGA was released so by the late 1980&#x27;s weren&#x27;t being sold with new machines. It was also fairly common to overclock the 8-MHz ISA bus to 10MHz on boards that didn&#x27;t have VLB. Anyway, my point is that in 1992, low end machines were coming with Hercules graphics and monochrome monitors. Anyone who could afford a color RGB monitor wasn&#x27;t getting it with VGA&#x2F;EGA because the monitor was 80% of the price (few hundred dollars) and a 512K SVGA card was well under a hundred.<p>Anyway, I guess the benchmarks in there were to show how slow plain VGA was, but really by the time frame of duke nukem, 486SX&#x27;s and VLB were radically changing the PC&#x27;s performance characteristics, even on fairly low end machines.<p>PS: I still have the cirrus technical manuals because back in the 1990&#x27;s you could call up these companies, tell them you were a software developer and they would send you a 400+ page technical manual that details registers and operational&#x2F;functional characteristics of the boards.