Skalabala wrote:

3Dmark 2000 I get just over 4700 that makes me feel serious sam must be playable but its around 15-20fp 🙁

How exactly did you get 4700 points in 3DMark 2000? How does the rest of the system look like?

I'm stuck at 1300 points 😠

One more tip I can suggest: plan out and organize your tests ahead of time. For example, determine the order you want to run the tests, that will take the minimum amount of configuration changes between runs. Make a spreadsheet template that you can organize how you want your results recorded, then just leave the results blank. This way when you get down to testing, you can simply fill cells in with results quickly and in an organized fashion, without fear of missing a result and having to reconfigure and go back.

oerk wrote:

Skalabala wrote:

3Dmark 2000 I get just over 4700 that makes me feel serious sam must be playable but its around 15-20fp 🙁

How exactly did you get 4700 points in 3DMark 2000? How does the rest of the system look like?

I'm stuck at 1300 points 😠

Hey bud 😀 You can have a look here, I do not want to spam this thread 😀
My K6 build :D

F2bnp wrote:

As far as games go, could you recommend any games you'd like to see? I know you've tested dozens and dozens of games on your website, but how did you go about testing titles with no benchmark tools? Could you point me towards specific games with specific testing methods?

As far as drivers go, I believe 3Dfx drivers started including 3DNow! optimizations from a certain point and onward, so using the latest drivers should have the most up to date optimizations (assuming they ever updated them after first introducing them anyway).

With tools like fraps you just need to find a repeatable sequence within a game. I am not going to suggest titles, but it just makes great sense to me include genres that might be designed in different ways than usual shooters or even obscure games were driver optimizations are not to be expected.
I am suggesting drivers with optional 3dnow, in order to quantify difference with it on and off.

Yes, I see where you're going with this. I'll see what I can do about it, if anyone wants to suggest any game, I 'd be happy to oblige. I just procured Breakneck that meljor mentioned, I'll see if it runs properly on my setups.
Speaking of drivers, I see what you mean. That's actually a pretty good idea, I could perhaps compare different driver versions from a point when 3DNow! optimizations were not implemented and from another where they were, or even compare later drivers to earlier to see if they did any further optimizations.
There's only one issue with this. The Voodoo5 came out in mid 2000, so I'm pretty sure I can't do that sort of testing. In fact, I don't think even Voodoo3 would qualify for this, with a release date of Spring 1999, I'd be better off with Voodoo2 SLI, but in that case I'd be introducing a GPU bottleneck, which I'd like to avoid.

In other news, I am well underway testing and I'll probably finish up on the 333 today, depending on whether or not I have any annoyances in the day 🤣 . I also found out that Tomb Raider 3 had a 3DNow! patch, so I took TR4 out of the equation and will test Tomb Raider 3 instead. I'm not sure if they are the best of candidates, since they have a hard 30fps limit and I'm relatively sure I won't see performance dip below that in any case. I guess we'll see.

Don't be reluctant to suggest games because I'm finishing up on one CPU, these Slot 1 CPUs are so easy to just pop off and install another that it wouldn't be an annoyance in any way.

By driver with optional 3dnow I meant a single release which allows to turn it off or on, be it by registers or other method. Maybe 3dfx did not have such option.

Does someone perhaps have a saved campaign in an old turn based strategy game of some sort that is taking some significant time to finish a turn? HOMM, Civ, BotF, etc? That could be easily timed with a stopwatch.

I've also been looking into Total Annihilation but just don't see a way to get performance metrics off of that. Sigh.

Aah, stopwatch benchmarks. I like this one: Open the picture in mspaint and fill the white space with black using bucket. For old CPUs you ought to use something lot smaller 🤣

swaaye wrote:

Does someone perhaps have a saved campaign in an old turn based strategy game of some sort that is taking some significant time to finish a turn? HOMM, Civ, BotF, etc? That could be easily timed with a stopwatch.

I've also been looking into Total Annihilation but just don't see a way to get performance metrics off of that. Sigh.

Man, doesn't that suck? No strategy games from that era have any sort of way of comparing performance 🙁. The only two I've managed to use for this project are Commandos Behind Enemy Lines and Desperados, both of which are quite intensive once you crank the resolution up.

Also, Putas that's quite a hilarious "benchmark". 🤣

The super maze color fill might be useful for those crazies testing their CPUs with no caches. 😁

It sure takes a while to do on my FX 8350. I don't want to even try this on the K6 🤣 .

That maze took a few minutes on my i7-720qm laptop. It was stumbling through Win7's unbelievably slow update checking process at the time, which probably didn't help.

I found the reason why filling the maze is somewhat sluggish even on a modern system. Paint isn't very multithreaded!

I ran into a few issues with some of the games, especially Half-Life which requires an older version than what I have (1.0.1.0., GOTY) to run timedemos. Will get rid of those issues soon and start testing once more 😀.

All tests are done, currently waiting for some MVP3 results from Imperious, meanwhile I'm making some graphs with the recorded data. Expect a new thread soon! 😊

F2bnp wrote:

All tests are done, currently waiting for some MVP3 results from Imperious, meanwhile I'm making some graphs with the recorded data. Expect a new thread soon! 😊

I've done some of the tests, might get the rest done tonight if I can get out of playing Tennis.

Imperious wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

All tests are done, currently waiting for some MVP3 results from Imperious, meanwhile I'm making some graphs with the recorded data. Expect a new thread soon! 😊

I've done some of the tests, might get the rest done tonight if I can get out of playing Tennis.

Like I said man, no hurries, take your time and enjoy 😉.

I just set up two systems for comparison: a PII 550Mhz and an Athlon 550Mhz. Would the results of comparing these be useful?

Somewhat, especially if you can pair the Athlon with a Voodoo 5 or at least Voodoo3 and run it at 640x480. It would show IPC improvements on the Athlon over the K6-2/3 beautifully 😀.

Voodoo 3 - check! The quest begins...