It's good to see that the latest GPUs can still be used in "dumb framebuffer" mode, are mostly VGA-compatible, and have VESA VBE support. I suspect AMD / NVIDIA might still have some sort of DOS-based factory tooling when bringing up new GPUs for the first time. In sadder news, I've read that the latest Intel integrated GPUs no longer have a VBIOS and are UEFI-only; although it might only be a matter of time before someone vibe-codes (vibe-ports?) one based on those from an older model.
BIOS support has indeed been dropped from modern video cards. I was hoping something like https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap might work, but the README says that MS-DOS games don't work under that.
That has a very generic VBIOS which would probably work on an original IBM VGA, but the problem is that each GPU needs a specific VBIOS to switch it between VGA and hi-res modes by writing vendor-specific registers. VBIOS is effectively a driver, so given the necessary documentation or existing OSS driver source it should be possible to write a suitable one even for GPUs that are UEFI-only.
It's good to see that the latest GPUs can still be used in "dumb framebuffer" mode, are mostly VGA-compatible, and have VESA VBE support. I suspect AMD / NVIDIA might still have some sort of DOS-based factory tooling when bringing up new GPUs for the first time. In sadder news, I've read that the latest Intel integrated GPUs no longer have a VBIOS and are UEFI-only; although it might only be a matter of time before someone vibe-codes (vibe-ports?) one based on those from an older model.