Stull wrote:

I think only a masochist would play a game at 10 FPS when higher framerates are available on a slightly faster system. 😜

Well, yeah, but from the perspective of someone working with limited resources back in 1996, it's certainly better than nothing.

As someone who's played quite a few old console/PC/home computer 3D games at those (or often quite a bit lower) framerates, "playable" is definitely a relative term.

OTOH, unless you HAD to play Quake, and you were "stuck" with a 486, it would make a lot more sense to stick with other games for your "3D action" fix. (like various Doom based games, Duke3D/build games, Decent, or several flight/space sims) Personally, I like many of those a good bit more than Quake anyway. :p

kool kitty89 wrote:

sunaiac wrote:

Not even Quake 😁 (around 25 FPS witrh voodoo 2 according to tests here)

25 FPS is more than playable . . .

And, again, 25 FPS for GLQuake is certainly playable. That is, unless you mean 25 FPS average -or peak- with frequent drops below 10 FPS, still arguably playable depending just how stuttery that gets. (solid 10 FPS with no stutter would still be playable IMO, not great, but not unusable)

It certainly was awesome at quake release date, but nowadays its hard to get back to 25FPS average.
Especially since the 486 WILL drop to 10 or so sometimes, like, whenever there's a larger field of view or too many monsters 😀

I'd been crazy if I'd had that speed in 1997, but sadely frame smoothness is the kind of thing you get used pretty quick to, making it hard to go back on old games (where i have no pb with super old 2D games on the other hand 😀 )

The SiS 496/497 is a very good chipset!
It runs 3x50MHz without any problems. But don't forget so set the PCI divider to 1/2 bus clock and set your cache strategy to 3-2-3 unless you are using 12ns for data, 10ns for tag. But for 50mhz I recommend a 12ns tag-ram anyways.
If no PCI divider is available you are stuck at 160MHz but this should be ~ the same speed.
Try "Screamer" in svga - it's very demanding but should run fine. maybe you have a GUS card as sound card? this card has its own cpu for audiosampling and therefore the 486 cpu has more cycles left for the game.

Good luck!

sunaiac wrote:

It certainly was awesome at quake release date, but nowadays its hard to get back to 25FPS average.
Especially since the 486 WILL drop to 10 or so sometimes, like, whenever there's a larger field of view or too many monsters 😀

I'd been crazy if I'd had that speed in 1997, but sadely frame smoothness is the kind of thing you get used pretty quick to, making it hard to go back on old games (where i have no pb with super old 2D games on the other hand 😀 )

For me, using DOSBox on an athlon XP 1600+ meant playing some later games at pretty mediocre speeds, even at moderate detail settings. (even Tie Fighter was not very playable in highres mode at decent detail levels, but it and X-Wing were OK at 320x200 -I don't think I tried Quake on that machine though)

That and playing a variety of old 3D/pseudo 3D games on 80s/90s game consoles and some old home computer stuff. (in many cases, more "trying out" for fun than seriously playing for any length of time . . . oddly enough I was more frustrated with the control limitations than the framerate/graphics on some old console flight sims like F-22 and F-15-II on the Genesis -lack of rudder control is a huge PITA, rolling for every turn is NOT practical for dogfights or especially ground attack)

Plus, there's plenty of mainstream mid/late-90s console games with pretty mediocre framerates (and low resolutions, obviously). If PC gamers had been willing to settle for 320x240 and ~20-30 FPS (dropping into the teens at times), cards like the ViRGE and early Rage would have been much less criticized . . . well, aside from the bugs/compatibility problems. (the Mystique's issues are another matter though, especially the lack of any translucency/alpha blending support -something even the Atari Jaguar and 3DO could at least do to some degree, to a similar degree as the PS1 for that matter)

For that matter, I was putting up with fairly mediocre framerates on that same aging Athlon system for newer games. Athlon 1600+ and Radeon 9600SE was going to be pretty limited for ~2006 games.
More recently, I played through Portal on my Turion X2 2GHz laptop with Geforce 7150 . . . choppy at times even at modest detail and 720x480. (fairly smooth most of the time, but the GLADOS fight was boarderline)

Heh, it's been too long since I've had a really decent gaming PC (that Athlon machine was pretty good when we built it in 2003, upgrading from a celeron 1000).
It wouldn't cost all that much to build a decent mid-range desktop these days, but currently, I'm more interested in getting my DOS/98SE gaming reg set-up. (and some pending non-computer related projects at home that are long overdue) This isn't mostly for nostalgia either, but for tons of games I missed out on back then, especially space sims and graphic adventure games, maybe some RPGs too. (we had x-wing and the 9x version of tie fighter, but I didn't even know about the Wing Commander series) Plus, some games we had (still have, mostly) that I never completed, or played much.