borgie83 wrote:

how could the above combination handle for instance UT2003 or Doom 3

Short answer: It won't.

Doom 3 ran ok on an Athlon 64 with a Geforce 6600GT.

As always people have different meanings of "it runs a game" 😀

@Mau1wurf1977, yeah that's exactly why I wanted to only know games that could be run with "almost max to max settings". I mean, a lot of games can be run on crappy hardware but in my opinion, they're not worth playing unless you can enjoy them the way they were meant to be played. Sorta like how when a movie comes out these days, I wont watch it until I can see it on bluray because SD just doesn't do the movie justice.

Trying to think of games from that era...

I had a gap of four years of zero computing and it was pretty much the period from Pentium 3. My last PC was a Pentium II and after 4 years back with Nortwood P4.

You can google old Pentium III reviews and check the benchmarks they used. E.g. for a P III 1000 reviews they used Unreal Tournament, Expendable and Quake 3 arena.

Yeah, I'll read a few reviews but the only problem with reviews is that they always review games on current hardware which is to be expected. I was hoping to build a small list of games like some of the ones stated previously so I know how far I can push this hardware. For example, my I7 870 (4 years old) + Radeon HD7750 (2 years old) rig can still play games made within the last year on almost max settings.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Short answer: It won't. […]
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borgie83 wrote:

how could the above combination handle for instance UT2003 or Doom 3

Short answer: It won't.

Doom 3 ran ok on an Athlon 64 with a Geforce 6600GT.

As always people have different meanings of "it runs a game" 😀

I finished Doom III on my PIII. It was more than a year ago, but I remember it playing quite nicely @ medium-high and 1280x960. To me, "playing quite nicely" means an average frame rate of 30fps or more. If you happen to be a 60fps junkie, then yeah, you'd probably need an A64 and GF6800.

I don't have much experience with Slot 1 stuff, so I don't know exactly how much slower a Coppermine @ 1000/100 is than a Tualatin @ 1585/151, but assuming that my bottleneck was my 9800 Pro, Doom III would probably run okay on a PIII-1000 with an FX5950. IIRC that game heavily favored NVIDIA cards.

I would just run Doom 3 on modern hardware really. Patch it so you can do Widescreen too. If its more about the Doom 3 experience then playing it on a real vintage platform a modern machine will be the superior experience.

Doom 3, at least going by the demo, ran terribly on that old Athlon XP 1800+/512 MB DDR-266/Radeon 9600 XT box I used to be stuck with. UT 2003/2004 didn't fare much better.

A Core 2 Quad Q6600/2 GB DDR2-667/GeForce 8800 GT box could manhandle said demo with ease, but I haven't tested it on my more period-appropriate Pentium 4 EE 3.2 GHz/2 GB DDR-400/GeForce 6800 Ultra or Athlon XP 3200+/1 GB DDR-333/GeForce FX 5950 Ultra systems.

Keep in mind that I expect "running a game" to mean "high-max settings, 60 FPS average if not minimum". I especially have little tolerance for low, inconsistent framerates.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I don't have much experience with Slot 1 stuff, so I don't know exactly how much slower a Coppermine @ 1000/100 is than a Tualatin @ 1585/151, but assuming that my bottleneck was my 9800 Pro, Doom III would probably run okay on a PIII-1000 with an FX5950. IIRC that game heavily favored NVIDIA cards.

Well, curiosity and the lack of a social life got the best of me, so I tried running Doom III on what normally is my Glide/Win98 system. It's powered by a Tualatin 1200 (the version with only 256K of L2), underclocked to 900MHz/100MHz FSB thanks to the BX chipset. I bumped the RAM up to 768MB, threw in my 9800 Pro, and booted into WinXP. I ran the game with the same settings used on my PIII-S system (High, 1024x768, no AA)

The performance was not great at all. It was only averaging around 13fps, or about 2.5x slower than the 1585MHz PIII-S system.
I honestly didn't think a PIII in the 900-1GHz range was that much slower. Based on that performance, I'd wager that a quite a few of the games I listed before might not run as well on a 1GHz CuMine as I had orginally thought. Many of them have similar system requirements to Doom III.

Awesome for trying out and reporting it back!

I agree, Standard Def Steve...you're a legend! Thanks for that 😀

The 9800 Pro is basically around the same performance as the FX5950 so it's really given a good indication of what can be expected from this combination. I think games made after 2002 are going to be quite limited by the 1ghz Pentium 3 cpu.

Does anyone know what gpu would be best combined with this cpu without creating a bottleneck? I'm thinking one of the lower end FX series gpu's?

Did you play with the latest version and also changed the rendering path?

Mafia seemed a little choked with Ti4200, Athlon XP 2600+ and 512MB ram, you could try it on max settings to see what happens.

a friend used to play Doom 3 with a 1.1GHz Coppermine, it worked well enough.

actually I think the FX5950 will be a bigger problem for doom 3 than the p3 or 512mb if you go for high settings and 1024x768 or higher.

borgie83 wrote:

I agree, Standard Def Steve...you're a legend! Thanks for that 😀

The 9800 Pro is basically around the same performance as the FX5950 so it's really given a good indication of what can be expected from this combination. I think games made after 2002 are going to be quite limited by the 1ghz Pentium 3 cpu.

Does anyone know what gpu would be best combined with this cpu without creating a bottleneck? I'm thinking one of the lower end FX series gpu's?

No problem!
Any GF4 TI would be great in a 1GHz box. A Radeon 9500 Pro would also be a good fit, providing the speed of a TI4600 in DX8 games and being D3D9 ready.

I believe the Radeon 9600s were, unlike any of the other 9x00 cards, keyed to fit only in 1.5v AGP slots.

EDIT: Although, if that FX5950 would otherwise be collecting dust, just keep using it!

Here's what we used to use [win2k generally, eventually xp]:

- ut2004 used to be playable on a 1ghz p3 with ti4

- warcraft3 was fine with p3 866 and mx440

- dawn of war played well with athlon xp2000/ti4800 or xp3000/6600

i didn't think doom3 was fluid until i got a 6800gt with athlon x2.

A Geforce 2 Ultra and a 1000MHz Coopermine seems like a happy couple to me. Or a FX5200.

borgie83 wrote:

@Mau1wurf1977, that's what I was worried about. I guess I won't know until I try I guess.

What about Dawn of War and Warcraft 3? Oh and Postal 2?! How good was that game!...still got memories of running around urinating on people until they threw up. No wonder it got banned.

Dawn of War requires pretty extensive DX9 if memory serves - I remember it being pretty demanding when it was new, and at the time I had a GeForce 6800. Take a look at the system requirements: http://dawnofwar.filefront.com/info/Requirements It mentions DX9b and at least a 1.4GHz CPU for the base-game (the expansions get even worse from there).

By contrast, WarCraft 3 will probably run with everything fully maxed out thru the campaigns, but if you get into multiplayer or skirmish games it will drag with a lot of AI players (like if you do a full 8-way or 12-way or whatever the limit it supports is); my Pentium 4 2.0 with a GF2 MX had zero problems running that game thru the campaign (and the expansion) but a "maxed" multiplayer or skirmish game would usually result in some laggy spots (just the sheer number of units on-screen I think; my AthlonXP 2600+ and 3000+ did the same thing).

Half-Life 2 will probably be a slideshow - I say this not based on the CPU/GPU combo but the AGP 2x setting; I remember my 5900XT barely making it through the intro-video when set to AGP 1x/2x; at 4x/8x it was fine for 800x600 thru the game with only a few spots being laggy (if you really want to play HL2, get a Radeon 9700/9800 - it'll do much better). Doubt the later Episodes would play. That game was much better with a 6800GT.

Other games that come to mind:

Hitman 1-3 should be no problem (1 and 2 will probably run fully maxed (incl AA and AF))
UT03 and UT04 should be no problem (may run fully maxed depending on what resolution you want)
ORB should at least run as long as it doesn't have a fit about some component in your system (its kind of picky)
Doom 3 will probably run as long as you don't mind turning some stuff down (if it can run on a Voodoo...; but more seriously your system doesn't have enough memory/power to enable Ultra - but at its "Normal" setting where it actually uses texture compression and whatnot it should be fine)
Quake 3 of course
The Sims and The Sims 2 (The Sims 2 will run at low settings and some expansions won't work - it's deceptively demanding)
Morrowind (performance will heavily depend on what kind of mods/optimizations/etc (or lack thereof) you get into)
Empire Earth and its expansion (probably fully maxed; no idea what it'd do with thousands of units on-screen on your machine though)
C&C Renegade (probably fully maxed depending on resolution)
Emperor (bugs aside)

If I think of anything else, I'll try to add it back to that.

As far as the debate over "what constitutes running" (since it seems to matter): playable frame-rates at a reasonable resolution (this is dictated by the monitor; with LCDs you have less choices unless they're good at scaling). Playable is minimal or no frames taking longer than 16ms to complete. Settings it depends on the game - some games have few things to change, some games the settings don't make much of a visual impact (or only affect certain parts of the game), other games the settings can make a dramatic difference. I'll also add that "full max" doesn't always look best to me - for example I can't stand the bloom effect in GTA Vice City, or the HDR effect in Oblivion - both look horrible in my view, so I turn them off and enjoy the performance boost associated with them. It really depends on the game in question.

I will not get into a "as the artist intended" kind of debate other than to say I wish that line had never crawled out of the world of wackado audio.

Borgie:

RA2 came out in 2000, and "C&C2" (Tiberian Sun) came out in 1999. They do not feature 3D (the GeForce 6800 therefore means nothing to it) and will run "fully maxed" (there aren't a lot of settings to change on either game - RA2 for example will, by default, offer you 800x600 or 1024x768 as resolution options, and options related to sound) on a Pentium III with Intel Integrated Graphics and ~256MB of RAM (sources: I've done it); if they're lagging on a Pentium 4 there's a problem with either the game's installation, your DX installation, or something else. But it isn't the games themselves; their system requirements are around a 200MHz Pentium and 64MB of memory.

Standard Def Steve:

Most of the later R300 cards are keyed for 1.5V only (the 9600 among them); afaik some of the earlier boards are keyed to be universal (like the 9500).

The way I see it, as soon as games use DX9 or OpenGL and run under Windows XP, go straight to a semi-modern PCIe system. Core 2 Duo or Phenom II / Athlon II are solid options for little money.

If you are building a late Windows 98SE AGP system then either a 3.2 GHz Northwood system or A64 should work quite well.

Of the games mentioned here, how many do not run under XP or with issues?

I feel all the games mentioned here are way to modern for a P III system.

Most DX9 games will run fine under Windows Vista and later (like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2) and most of the more popular DX8 titles will be patched-up as well (like WarCraft 3). But that seemed to be somewhat beside the point, unless I'm missing something.

I will tell you that I have *never* gotten ORB to work properly on anything newer than XP, and that Empire Earth and Morrowind seem to have issues under Windows 7 x64. I vaguely remember Emperor also being kind of a pain on Vista, but that was a while ago (and that game can be so finicky on install to begin with...).

ratfink wrote:

Here's what we used to use [win2k generally, eventually xp]: […]
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Here's what we used to use [win2k generally, eventually xp]:

- ut2004 used to be playable on a 1ghz p3 with ti4

- warcraft3 was fine with p3 866 and mx440

- dawn of war played well with athlon xp2000/ti4800 or xp3000/6600

i didn't think doom3 was fluid until i got a 6800gt with athlon x2.

UT 2004 was borderline unplayable on an Athlon XP 1800+ with a Radeon 9600 XT. That system stands no chance.

I'm not sure exactly when it would've become playable enough for its fast pace, given that I skipped from the above straight to a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and GeForce 8800 GT, which made it very playable, but I'd expect an Athlon 64 to be the practical minimum for maintaining 60 FPS. You don't want any less when it comes to Unreal Tournament, and Unreal Engine 2 was known to be quite CPU-limited at the time, especially when UT 2004 didn't even use any shader effects.

And yes, the aforementioned AXP 1800+/9600 XT system choked on Doom 3. I can only imagine what GeForce 4 MX owners had to put up with.