Well NFS 1 is my all time favorite racing game, and I used to play it with my friends a lot back in 1995, and I remember some facts. First I remember I couldn't play it because I had a 386/40 with 4MB RAM. Then upgraded for a short while to 486/40, but it was almost the same. Meanwhile my best friend got a 486dx2/66 with 8MB RAM and onboard Cirrus Logic card. It would play NFS, but not very well in the high resolution. I'm talking about the first NFS, not the SE. You were able to choose between 320x200 and 640x480. My friend would play it on the low-res. Later I upgraded to a pentium 100 with 8MB RAM, but still couldn't play the game, as I had a crappy 256kb svga from my 386. Then I buy a used trident 8900 with 1MB (ISA) from another friend, and we were very surprised to see that NFS would run pretty good at 640x480. The pentium does a really good job. And after a few months I bought a new Cirrus Logic PCI card with 1MB, and it played just great. Now let's come to the present time. After all these years I've managed to collect a few boards, and tried some things. First I tried with a 486/66 with VL BUS S3 805 I think (that's what I mentioned wrong in my other post). I thought it might play better on hi-res compared to my friends 486 with the Cirrus Logic, but I was wrong. It was the same. I tried the S3 card to his 486 also, with no result, too. Then I have a PCI board and tried other cpus, ranging from 100 to 133MHz, and was able also to overclock the 133 to 160, and with my S3 trio 64 card, I thought it would be ok. It was way better than the slower 486, but still couldn't match the pentium. And it's not only how it looks, as when I'm using the pentium, it is a lot more easy to play, and especially to steer the car. However, @320x200 it will play nice even on the 66MHz 486. Right now I have not set up a 486 machine, because to me it is not very usefull, but since I have stored the boards, I can run 3dbench to see what's going on. After all, my boards may not be the greatest, compared to others'... 😀

Well I wasn't making anything up, NFS did run well. What doesn't run well is Interstate '76, Daytona USA, NASCAR Racing 2, and anything else after the year 1996. 😀

Thanks for the detailed write up Markk!

I was profoundly annoyed when I got X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and found that it would always lock up in-flight on my 5x86 160. I think the game uses Pentium instructions. Either that or it was incompatible with something else...

Anyone run that on a 486 class CPU?

Yes and I didn't get freezeups. :? Sorry for this unhelpful post.

leileilol wrote:

Well I wasn't making anything up, NFS did run well. What doesn't run well is Interstate '76, Daytona USA, NASCAR Racing 2, and anything else after the year 1996. 😀

I'm not implying that you were making anything up. First of all, different setups may lead to different results concerning performance. Speaking for myself, I have 4 different 486 boards, just for my collection, and with no intention to use them. Maybe other boards are a lot better than mine, and someone who really wants to use a 486 would be also interested in finding the best stuff possible. And to be honest, in the beggining I hoped that on a fast 486 with a good video card, it would be ok. And it may be ok if you compare it to a 486/66, where even at the beggining if you push the throttle to the max before the green light, you hear the sound of the engine reving being somewhat like having steps instead of being continuous. And we're talking about high-res and full detail. Certainly it would be playable on the 5x86, but I'm 100% sure that on the pentium it runned a lot better, because immediately after that, I got out a pentium motherboard and tried a lot of different combinations. And the result was that for my stuff, using the pentium 75 with a cirruls logic card, it runned better than the 5x86 @ 160 and the s3 card. But I'm really curious now, and would like to test it again, as now I have another one pci 486 board, and see what happens. As of the other games, I really wanted to try interstate '76 on my pentium, just because I heard it supports the voodoo 1 card I have. And also, I think the most demanding racing game of that era, was Screamer. I can't really understand why is that so. I mean I find the graphics worse compared to NFS, but even on my Pentium 233 which has 64MB RAM and a 4MB diamond stealth 3d 2000, and it doesn't run very well @ 640x480. I think that's strange because it's a 1995 game, with 486/66 minimum requirement.

I'm pretty sure that all full 3D, texture-mapped games run better on a Pentium unless the comparison is a P60 and a 5x86-160 (Quake would probably run similarly on them).

A Pentium typically has around twice the memory/bus bandwidth, a much faster FPU, is superscalar, and has more and faster cache RAM. It adds up.

If you compile Quake with only C routines, the performance on both the 486 and Pentium with the same builds at the same clock rates are equal. 😀

It sounds like the C routines turn a Pentium into a 486. If the code isn't designed to use the Pentium's parallelism that's what would happen. Pentium is a braindead in-order CPU.

Does the performance of the 486 improve? Relatively unoptimized C routines vs. Pentium assembly on a 486. 😁

They don't improve for the 486, infact go down a little bit (like 5 frames less average on timedemo demo1) but for a Pentium it's a catastrophic loss.

I guess that means that the assembly even benefits a 486. That's almost surprising!

I had some time today, and thought to try some things with the 486s I have. I have 2 PCI boards and both have the same chipset (sis 496/497). The first is model made by J-Mark or Jetboard I think , and the second is by Chaintech. The second had a lot of problems. At the beggining I run both without the turbo jumper closed, and by using the diamond stealth 64 with the S3 trio chip and running 3dbench, I got 37fps for the J. and 47 for the chaintech. Then as I had a lot of problems with chaintech I removed the cache I had on it, because I had borrowed it from another board, and I was bored to replace it again to run some benchmarks with the turbo on. The first with turbo scored 55.5 fps. I also tried with another card with S3 Virge, but it was the same performance. Of course I run NFS, and the system with the 55fps, wasn't fast enough. Then I got out a pentium board, and tested the 75MHz Pentium with the same video card. I got 79 fps on 3dbench, and the game run much better. Then I tried the 133MHz pentium, which scored 124fps on 3dbench, and the game's playability was fantastic. By testing the game, I found a way to tell if the pc is going ok to play it nice or not. Get the Ferrari and race the Lamborghini on city. When both cars start, the Lambo is going to get away, easy as its 4wd, but when playing on the Pentium, around 140mph the ferrari was leaving the other car behind. When I tried it at the 486, it was very difficult to follow the lambo 😀
However I had a very strange problem with both boards. The floppy wouldn't work correct, and the system would hang when trying to boot from it. It was like reading much slower, and after displaying Starting Ms-Dos..... it hangs. It happened on both motherboards. I tried 2 different floppy cables, 3 different floppy drives, I tried an isa controller instead of the onboard, but always the same result. I tried also using different simms, and also different cpus, and video cards. The same all the time... The only thing that didn't change was the PSU, but after that I tried the pentium Motherboard, and the floppy worked fine. I really can't tell why that's happening, and also why it happens to both boards....

Markk wrote:

However I had a very strange problem with both boards. The floppy wouldn't work correct, and the system would hang when trying to boot from it. It was like reading much slower, and after displaying Starting Ms-Dos..... it hangs. It happened on both motherboards. I tried 2 different floppy cables, 3 different floppy drives, I tried an isa controller instead of the onboard, but always the same result. I tried also using different simms, and also different cpus, and video cards. The same all the time... The only thing that didn't change was the PSU, but after that I tried the pentium Motherboard, and the floppy worked fine. I really can't tell why that's happening, and also why it happens to both boards....

Do those boards have any BIOS settings related to the floppy drive?

If I remember well, except from disabling the Floppy controller, no other strange settings... I tried everything I could, and then loaded the default bios settings lots of times. The same always...