Good to see someone else try a 3D card on a 486 system!

In my experience the best CPU to use is the Pentium overdrive 83mhz, I use a Voodoo3 on my machine but I dont think it would be any faster for this class of machine compared to the voodoo1.

For reference at 640x480 in Quake timedemo I got 27.0fps and 26.9fps at 800x600, cant remember the exact figures for the Cyrix 5x86-120 but its noticeably slower.

Did you run the quakedemo with the -nosound option?

Yep: glQuake -width 640 -heigh 480 -nosound -nocdaudio -nonet -nojoy +timedemo demo2

With Voodoo 2 card there was no difference, bottleneck there is obviously the CPU 🙁 Pentium Overdrive is an option, but I would like to stick with "true" 486 CPU. I know Cyrix 5x86 has few Pentium instructions, but...its stil 486 class CPU 😀 And according benchmarks, it IS considerably faster than Intel/AMD CPUs in some ways.

Good luck getting a Cyrix 5x86/133MHz. They are rare and expensive.

Other early Voodoo games that might run well on a 486:
Battle Arena Toshinden
Descent II
Scorched Planet
Whiplash/Fatal Racing
Extreme Assault
Starfighter
VR Soccer/Actua Soccer
Tomb Raider

They are rare and expensive.

Yeah I know. But maybe one day luck will smile on me! 😀

Thanks for game suggestions. I tried Tomb Raider and to my surprise, it works great! After that "Quake fiasco" I wasn't expecting much, but it is really smooth and playable 😀

You can always have a shot at running an IBM 5x86C at 2x66. Though, you'll have to do some soldering to get the magic 3.85V.

dirkmirk wrote:

Good to see someone else try a 3D card on a 486 system! […]
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Good to see someone else try a 3D card on a 486 system!

In my experience the best CPU to use is the Pentium overdrive 83mhz, I use a Voodoo3 on my machine but I dont think it would be any faster for this class of machine compared to the voodoo1.

For reference at 640x480 in Quake timedemo I got 27.0fps and 26.9fps at 800x600, cant remember the exact figures for the Cyrix 5x86-120 but its noticeably slower.

Did you run the quakedemo with the -nosound option?

Which motherboard were you using? Using W95, I noted 27.5 fps at 640x480 with an Am5x86-133 at 160 MHz. I also noticed that the Voodoo3 performed a fair amount better than the Banshee in GLQuake (26.0 fps vs. 24.0 fps, for example, in NT4).

We want some pictures! Also, make sure you submit your results to Phil's ultimate VGA benchmark. You would have to revert to stock clock to make it to the main table though...

btw, Speedsys mentions S3 videocard, not ET6000 😕

vetz wrote:

Other early Voodoo games that might run well on a 486: Battle Arena Toshinden Descent II Scorched Planet Whiplash/Fatal Racing E […]
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Other early Voodoo games that might run well on a 486:
Battle Arena Toshinden
Descent II
Scorched Planet
Whiplash/Fatal Racing
Extreme Assault
Starfighter
VR Soccer/Actua Soccer
Tomb Raider

Do any of these have a timedemo or some sort of benchmark?

feipoa wrote:

vetz wrote:

Other early Voodoo games that might run well on a 486: Battle Arena Toshinden Descent II Scorched Planet Whiplash/Fatal Racing E […]
Show full quote

Other early Voodoo games that might run well on a 486:
Battle Arena Toshinden
Descent II
Scorched Planet
Whiplash/Fatal Racing
Extreme Assault
Starfighter
VR Soccer/Actua Soccer
Tomb Raider

Do any of these have a timedemo or some sort of benchmark?

No timedemos or benchmarks.

Battle Arena Toshinden have a frame-counter built in. You reach the FPS limit of 30 FPS on a Pentium 90 (even on a Pentium 75 should max it out). I also believe the 3DFX version of Tomb Raider have a framecounter, but I may recall incorrectly and mix it with one of the other 3D accelerated versions.

Are there any DOS/Win95 games from approx. 1995 to 1997 which have a timedemo and take advantage of GPU acceleration (preferably 3dfx, OpenGL, or D3D) and were targeting the P75-P166 crowd besides Quake, GLQuake, and Quake II?

After achieving close to 30 fps in GLQuake on an Am5x86, I am curious which other titles, that were once considered only playable on a Pentium, can also be made playable on a 486 with a suitable graphics card.

Try Battlezone and Interstate '76 Gold.

Ok, so Tomb Raider has a frame counter and BattleZone (1998) and Interstate '76 Gold have timedemos? How do I run the timedemos? Are these D3D or 3Dfx games?

feipoa wrote:

After achieving close to 30 fps in GLQuake on an Am5x86

Wow! How the hell did you squeeze 30fps from the humble Am5x86? 😀

GLQuake defaults to gl_flashblend 1 which means much less lightmap updates (none for dynamic lights), which could further be reduced by r_dynamic 0. GLQuake is far more playable on a 486 than the software renderer 😀

Did someone say GLQuake and Voodoo?

GLQuake processor and resolution scaling with Voodoo2 attached 🤣

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

GLQuake processor and resolution scaling with Voodoo2 attached 🤣

Interesting, so a P100 would get about 45 fps. Did you notice the screen resolution of the game play change when you set the resolution to 800x600? For some reason, 640x480 and 800x600 look identical to me, with the exception of the console font. Why is this?

feipoa wrote:

dirkmirk wrote:

Good to see someone else try a 3D card on a 486 system! […]
Show full quote

Good to see someone else try a 3D card on a 486 system!

In my experience the best CPU to use is the Pentium overdrive 83mhz, I use a Voodoo3 on my machine but I dont think it would be any faster for this class of machine compared to the voodoo1.

For reference at 640x480 in Quake timedemo I got 27.0fps and 26.9fps at 800x600, cant remember the exact figures for the Cyrix 5x86-120 but its noticeably slower.

Did you run the quakedemo with the -nosound option?

Which motherboard were you using? Using W95, I noted 27.5 fps at 640x480 with an Am5x86-133 at 160 MHz. I also noticed that the Voodoo3 performed a fair amount better than the Banshee in GLQuake (26.0 fps vs. 24.0 fps, for example, in NT4).

PC CHIPS M918i with 512k cache, I have misplaced the original bios chip.... I tried using a newer flashed bios to get support for the cyrix 5x86 but it isn't the same as the Amptron DX9300 which is stated on the Mbarren.net website.

edit: I think it was the SIS chipset, I had better results with the ALI chipset according to my post about the board I got 40.1fps in the quake timedemo test using a POD83, however it still had significant slowdowns during the open areas or lots of enemies so its a bit misleading really.
Quick test ALI 1487/89 with Voodoo 3 & Riva TNT (PCI 486)

feipoa wrote:

Did you notice the screen resolution of the game play change when you set the resolution to 800x600?

Of course! This is on a LCD though.

Voodoo2 > Voodoo1 for 486. Don't underestimate multitexturing, means less passes of polygons through the slow bus.

It's also possible to "run" Quake III Arena on a 486 with a Voodoo2 also 😀 should roughly be 4-7fps, most of the CPU being sucked on the sound and shader code (realtime texturemapping calculations) due to a ton of float operation