clueless1 wrote on 2020-04-05, 18:18:
I think the coolest thing about your results is that the POD83 marginally outperforms the P60 and P75, showing that it's performing at true Pentium levels.
Did you happen to gather any other benchmark results? Doom would be interesting, not only because it's the industry-standard DOS game benchmark, but it also wouldn't be so FPU-skewed.
Let me first comment on practicality of DOOM framerates. I know many like to use Doom for performance testing. However, I think it is actually a very bad benchmark once you enter Pentium or fast 486 performance levels. Reason being that the DOOM is famously doing only 16bit bus transfers when retiring frames to video RAM. Therefore faster systems with optimum transfers are penalised if they don’t handle 16 bit bus writes optimally. While it still scales with CPU performance somehow the simple engine is no task for a Pentium and a significant part of DOOM performance is lost on fast systems.
At the same time since the game framerate is capped at 35 which almost any fast 486 or Pentium system can achieve, it stops being really useful for benchmarking even as a real-world test. You are essentially measuring how fast a particular system can do suboptimal things...
I can demonstrate this on two 486 chipsets where one has almost two times faster memory/L2 and yet is beaten in DOOM realticks with the same CPU and VGA.
When using DOOM as benchmark I actually prefer to run DOOM in low-res mode (as in Phil's pack) with minimum window and low details. When running like this the effect of bus writes is diluted and it scales much nicely.
But yes, I captured DOOM scores in my test and results are as follows:
Screenshot 2020-04-05 at 20.44.26.png
Basically PCI clock increase creates all the difference...