VOGONS


First post, by soviet conscript

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I discovered Phils collection of benchmark utilitys today and originally just wanted to compare a couple of OEM p1 systems I have but as I was putting everything away I happened to loom over and notice my pile of PCI/ISA cards just sitting there so I figured...what the hell.
the system

Gateway 2000, Pentium 120, 64MB FPM RAM, no L2 cache

Matrox Mystique 2mb PCI
3DBENCH – 104.2FPS
PCPBENCH – 24.9 FPS
DOOM – 51.55 FPS
Quake – 22.9 FPS

ATI RageII+DVD 4mb PCI
3DBENCH – 95.6
PCPBENCH –23.2
DOOM –51.47
Quake – 21.5

Rendition Verite 2100 4mb PCI
3DBENCH – 30.5
PCPBENCH – 17.9
DOOM – 12.1
Quake – 16.9

ATI Mach32 1mb PCI
3DBENCH – 87.9
PCPBENCH – 23.8
DOOM – 47.60
Quake – 22.0

S3 Trio64v+ 2mb PCI
3DBENCH – 104.3
PCPBENCH – 24.6
DOOM – 50.71
Quake – 22.6

S3 Trio64v2/DX 2mb PCI
3DBENCH – 104.3
PCPBENCH – 24.9
DOOM – 50.50
Quake – 22.8

Trident Providia 9685 4mb PCI
3DBENCH – 85.1
PCPBENCH – 22.6
DOOM – 47.73
Quake – 21.0

Trident TVGA8900 1mb ISA
3DBENCH – 39.5
PCPBENCH – 17.2
DOOM – 18.69
Quake – 16.3

WD Paradise accelerator 24 768kb ISA
3DBENCH – 45.9
PCPBENCH – 18.7
DOOM – 22.54
Quake – 17.7

Tseng ET4000ax 1mb ISA
3DBENCH – 39.5
PCPBENCH – 17.2
DOOM – 18.68
Quake – 16.3

sorry I didnt make a fancy graph. I do have 2 questions after all this.

1) why is it that some cards crawl when the DOOM demo plays but Quake almost always seems at least playable? is it because Quake relies more on the CPU then the video card?

2)whats going on with the Tseng 4000? I knew it would be behind the PCI cards but I thought it would be at the top of the three ISA cards I tested but instead its suspiciously about equal with the Trident?

Reply 1 of 5, by Harekiet

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Some cards like the rendition verite have a very slow vga core. Quake just runs in the regular linear 320x200 mode, which is fast on most cards, you can even run some tool to speed it up more on rendition verite I think. But doom uses modex and has to do more vga register writes when updating the screen which slows down way more on slow vga implementations.

Reply 2 of 5, by soviet conscript

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Harekiet wrote:

Some cards like the rendition verite have a very slow vga core. Quake just runs in the regular linear 320x200 mode, which is fast on most cards, you can even run some tool to speed it up more on rendition verite I think. But doom uses modex and has to do more vga register writes when updating the screen which slows down way more on slow vga implementations.

ah, interesting. I knew that the verite was supposed to be pretty poor in DOS VGA but I was surprised it was that bad

Reply 3 of 5, by archsan

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Thanks for the comparison, nice to know that a Verite is slower than those ISA cards in VGA!

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."—Arthur C. Clarke
"No way. Installing the drivers on these things always gives me a headache."—Guybrush Threepwood (on cutting-edge voodoo technology)

Reply 4 of 5, by soviet conscript

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I'm still puzzled by the tseng. it also gave me weird graphical errors during the quake demo, like VCR tracking lines at the top middle and bottom of the screen. I had the same problem when I tried playing Ultima 7 with a tseng ISA card. same effect with my other et4000 ISA card as well.

I haven't run the tests with an older machine yet. maybe the et4000 is faster on a 386 or 486 or the test is off? I just have a hard time believing those numbers when everyone myself included calls it a fast if not fastest ISA card for DOS games.