Were you running the BX at 133MHz which also overclocked the AGP bus?
Looking at Quake2 benchmark archive, it could be what VIA could do best. Intel chipsets has traditionally beaten VIA hard on concurrent bandwidth and latency. VIA made good improvements to catch up on latency with the VIA Apollo Pro 133A, but remained uncompetitive on concurrent bandwidth. If memory serves me right, I think both BX and i815 feature doubled the IOQ depth of any VIA chipsets at the time.

BTW, id Quake series had always been the bandwidth showcase for Intel.

SubZero wrote on 2020-04-06, 20:29:

Sure if you have time, please give it a run. I have only tested demo 1. If the logic is correct you should only get a bit more than 30 fps in 640x480.

I tried the link to the bank interleave patch withour luck. I also tried to google it without luck. Can you possibly provide it here?

Sure, I'll give it a go soon.

I linked to the patch, it's called Memory Interleave patch.

Double post because of visibility. I was mistaken, my Via C3 is clocked at 1466MHz due to the 133MHz FSB and I'm also using a single stick of 512MB CL3 PC-133 RAM. So I gave it a spin using Quake version 1.08 at a resolution of 640x480, here's what I got:

FASTVID off
Timedemo 1: 22.4 fps

Timedemo 2: 23.5 fps

FASTVID on
Timedemo 1: 65.6 fps

Timedemo 2: 71.6 fps

So, there's definitely something wrong on your end. Try using FASTVID instead of that other utility. If it persists, I could post my BIOS settings, but I'd say they're conservative since this is not a build that aims at top performance as should be rather apparent with that Via C3 in there. Also, I checked, this motherboard does enable bank interleaving by default despite it not being in the BIOS, so you're good on that end (if you have the latest BIOS at least).

Just for fun, I tried a few other things:

Quake under Win9X DOSBox:
Timedemo 1: 64.7 fps

Timedemo 2: 70.5 fps

WinQuake:
Timedemo 1: 55.7 fps

Timedemo 2: 61.7 fps

GLQuake:
Timedemo 1: 182 fps

Timedemo 2: 176.1 fps

Garrett W wrote on 2020-04-07, 17:57:

Try using FASTVID instead of that other utility.

I have tried both Fastvid and MTRRLFBE but with exactly same results. I also tried running through Windows, but with similar results. In 320x200 both in DOS and Windows i get ca 240-250 FPS, which seems reasonable. In GLQuake I receive ca 570 FPS in demo 1 and 610 FPS in demo 2. Only difference from your banchmark is that I used Quake 1.06 but I doubt version 1.08 would give any other results.

So all in all, the performance issues seems to be related to VESA only.

Try version 1.08 just so we are comparing apples to apples here. I'll see if I can grab photos of my BIOS settings. Are you using the latest BIOS?

So, the DOS version of Quake under Windows at 640x480 doesn't come anywhere near my results? Try WinQuake as well, we need to at least get one of these results to line up somewhat.

After updating to Quake 1.08 FPS increased to 88 on demo 1 and 100 on demo 2. So for sure seems to have been some kind of bug with VIA chipset in version 1.06. Probably should have been a few fps more, but anyway I call this solved now.

Thanks for your help Garrett!

Yeah you can probably do a bit better, but still a massive jump. It's probably VESA related as you said and the patch might have fixed something. Glad I was of help.

Garrett W wrote on 2020-04-08, 11:38:

I can grab photos of my BIOS settings.

Can you show me your bios settings?
i buy the MB based on Via Apollo Pro 133T+P3 Tualatin cpu with AMI bios... need perfomance settings for this chipset....
best regards.

Sorry no, it's been over two years and the system is in storage currently. I can tell you for certain though that my revision of the board is using Award BIOS and not AMI.