Fired up the K6-III+ again today and it really does feel sluggish. A quick edit though, the /timerefresh score from START location in WinQuake is actually 39.4fps, not 32fps as I had remembered. But the game really doesn't feel like it runs at the reported speeds. Carageddon 2 is also laggy in some areas despite running only in 640x480 with a VooDoo 2 powered GLide API. Perhaps I'm expecting too much ... after reading the reviews before investing in the build I probably hyped my own expections. Although it's one of my favourite retro builds, I think I'll be replacing the 1998/1999 games I currently have installed with some from 1996/1997. The 10GB hard drive will thank me for it.

Iris030380 wrote:

I have the same problem with my K6-III+ system. Even at full bore 550Mhz, the FPU capability seems to throttle any cards I throw in there. Even at OC speed the VooDoo 2 SLI was performing at only around 50% of what I know the cards are capable of. Quake 1 timedemo (1.08) at the start map posted around 32fps, which is really bad for a 550Mhz CPU even on a SS7 platform. I hit around 23.5fps with a Pentium 200 non MMX in there, for comparison. I'm sure a Pentium II 450Mhz would be well over 60fps. On the other hand, K6-III's are cool as shit. I took out one of the V2's and added a radeon 9200se (I think) as the 2D card because of the clean 2D display it gives in Windows and DOS.

Screamer 2 and Carmageddon Splat Pack (3Dfx versions) run in full awesome mode though. And WinQuake (despite the odd slowdown in bigger maps + firefights) has the feel that only a true retro build can give. DosBox be damned! When it comes to The Dismal Oubliette on Nightmare, I want it pure.

You may want to look into this, something's terrible wrong. What motherboard are you using? I've found Voodoo3 PCI to be very slow on Gigabyte GA-5AX for example, where as the AGP version is just fine. 32fps on GLQuake is terrible, only slightly above what a Voodoo 1 can manage.

F2bnp wrote:

Iris030380 wrote:

I have the same problem with my K6-III+ system. Even at full bore 550Mhz, the FPU capability seems to throttle any cards I throw in there. Even at OC speed the VooDoo 2 SLI was performing at only around 50% of what I know the cards are capable of. Quake 1 timedemo (1.08) at the start map posted around 32fps, which is really bad for a 550Mhz CPU even on a SS7 platform. I hit around 23.5fps with a Pentium 200 non MMX in there, for comparison. I'm sure a Pentium II 450Mhz would be well over 60fps. On the other hand, K6-III's are cool as shit. I took out one of the V2's and added a radeon 9200se (I think) as the 2D card because of the clean 2D display it gives in Windows and DOS.

Screamer 2 and Carmageddon Splat Pack (3Dfx versions) run in full awesome mode though. And WinQuake (despite the odd slowdown in bigger maps + firefights) has the feel that only a true retro build can give. DosBox be damned! When it comes to The Dismal Oubliette on Nightmare, I want it pure.

You may want to look into this, something's terrible wrong. What motherboard are you using? I've found Voodoo3 PCI to be very slow on Gigabyte GA-5AX for example, where as the AGP version is just fine. 32fps on GLQuake is terrible, only slightly above what a Voodoo 1 can manage.

Sorry I wasn't clear. The K6-III+ is running at 550Mhz and the WinQuake timerefresh is under standard 2D mode, running off a Geforce 2 MX-400. Not OpenGL mode. Just standard software mode. Also I made a mistake, the real score is 39fps in the timerefresh at standard 320x240 resolution. It still just seemed a bit slow to me, as a vanilla Pentium 200 scores in the mid 20's, and this K6-III is a full 350Mhz faster with advanced instructions to boot. I know AMD K5/K6 chips were slower than Intel at floating point but I was expecting more than 39fps out of this machine.

The motherboard is an FIC PA-2013 ATX and I believe I'm running it at 5.5x 100Mhz, stock voltage. There is 256MB SD-100 in there (2x128), a GF2 MX-400 and an 8MB VooDOO 2. Anyways, here are some benchmarks of WinQuake timedemos, all in 2D (Software) rendering mode and 320x240 resolution...

TIMEDEMO DEMO1 .... 44.1fps
TIMEDEMO DEMO2 .... 45.5fps
TIMEDEMO DEMO3 .... 42.2fps

I'm sure a Pentium 2 450 would double if not tripple those scores?

320x200 on a K6-III+ 550 results in ~89FPS on DEMO1.

So what do you think could be causing my super low FPS? Now I'm seriously freaked out, because everything is set up correctly as far as I know! 😒

Forgot to add, that's on the DOS version. I never use WinQuake, it's kind of crappy. So, I have no clue as to what is causing such lame performance 😜.

No quake runs as fast as native DOS quake, but I'm certain the difference in speed isn't as big as this. Maybe winquake.exe without the -fastvid and other command line optimisations is around 20% slower due to the OS overhead taking a piece of the CPU, but definitely not 100% slower. I'll run a timedemo demo1 in pure DOS quake just to be sure.

Just tried 320x240 in DOS Quake. 70FPS.