in all, for a pentium4 to match the core2's single core performance, it must be running at over 2.5 times the clock of the latter, that is, 4ghz vs 1.6ghz. but if you are talking about the amd apu e350 then, its surely no match for the core2.
also unreal is among those old games well optimized for glide, which sometimes uses far less cpu load than running with modern d3d cards.
its the same thing like p2 vs k6-2 war in quake2. with opengl cards(nvidia or ati), k6-2 can only score a bit more than half the fps of p2. but with glide cards, the k6-2 boosts by so much that they are on par.

So, the difference could be attributed either to Glide or the CPU?

I am asking because I am taking advantage of GOG's anniversary sale, and I am sure this is going to come up a lot.

It will be particularly interesting to see how Quake and Quake II run on this machine if I get around to it.

E350 might be slower per clock than a Pentium 3. P4 Northwood 2.4 should be quite a bit faster. But still you should be able to play old games quite acceptably.

Remember the IGP in E350 is slow too. Memory bandwidth is shared and only single channel 64bit DDR3. The IGP itself is similar to the lowest Radeon 5000 models. I suspect 1024x768 is the way to go even with oldies. Ive used the similar Radeon 4350 and that's what I saw.

Multiple cores have no value for gaming until maybe 2007.

swaaye wrote:

E350 might be slower per clock than a Pentium 3. P4 Northwood 2.4 should be quite a bit faster. But still you should be able to play old games quite acceptably.

Remember the IGP in E350 is slow too and will have trouble with resolutions above 1024x768 even in oldies. It has limited memory bandwidth and the fillrate/ALU specs are minimal too overall.

Multiple cores have no value for gaming until maybe 2007.

Well, I am scoring considerably better than the video you did with your P3. I think the average is about 55fps on mine. And that's even at 1600 x 900.

I'm not bothered by any of this. Beyond about 30 my old eyes can't really tell much difference. I just thought it was a bit odd when I saw the one from our aussie friend. It seems to suggest that old retro rigs with Voodoo can still kick ass when running the old games even today.

I think my P3 was only running 1050 MHz in my videos though and also only on a 100MHz FSB.

With Unreal you would do well to try OldUnreal for the enhanced OpenGL / D3D9 renderers. They are also known as UTGLR and are available for Deus Ex and Unreal Tournament as well. It should perform better than the old renderers. Look better too.

Look into Pentium Mobile era (2003-2005) as there is a lot of options both in laptops and a rare few desktops as well even the HP TC1100 that has a Geforce 4 420. On the low end they will run early 2000s games just fine while still managing to play youtube and on the high end you will be surprised.

Yes. The numbers I cited are with OldUnreal installed. The renderers are indeed better. The stock DX renderer (DX7?) won't even run.

Single core performance of AMD E-350 is around P-IV 3GHz / Athlon XP 2500+. Have you checked that you don't have v-sync enabled. Then you can't get over 60fps. You can also check where is the bottleneck - CPU or GPU. Set game resolution to 640x480, run Task manager in the background and see if one of the cores is in the rage of 90-100%. Then increase resolution to 800x600 and higher and check Task manager again. If the load is below 90% then the GPU is the limiter. You can also monitor GPU usage with GPU-Z program.

Doesn't OldUnreal include a frame limiter? I'm pretty sure I read something in this direction, and Google seems to agree. Maybe read the docs?
(Reason is that Unreal has some physics bugs with high frame rates so a limit is a good workaround. IIRC binding the process to only one CPU is also necessary on SMP machines which the patch also does.)

I think for desktop cpus like Core 2 or Phenom the answer is no - there are none that are "low end" compared to P4 or similar. But some ultra low power stuff can be worse off - I remember reading somewhere that Atom, for example, is worse clock for clock than P4, but it uses like 1/10th the power ofc. For old games it shouldn't matter since all of these will be faster than a K6 or P2 or whatever. One thing I have noticed though is some old games don't like multi-core/SMP systems which can be a problem for whatever modern chip vs a P4. That's compatibility though, not performance.

DX9 mode... Is that with a non-official graphics-enhancing patch? It's likely more demanding.

And yes, glide is very efficient. These E series processors are basically netbook processors and not much better than the Intel Atom. It doesn't take much to stress it. I have such a notebook and it struggles with most tasks...

On other news, the GOG.com version of Unreal Gold runs flawless on vintage hardware with Voodo graphics (Windows 98 SE). You can follow my guide to extract the files and then run it from a folder: http://youtu.be/oK_OtUYWR9s

Also, I always disable HT on faster P4 chips...

Question? what is this new unreal version you all are talking about? Steam version? Gog version?
I only have the CD copies... lots of them, they were bundled with so many things... even the return to na pali xpac.

I'm running the 227i patch on top of the Gog version (it was on sale for $2.50, so I thought "what the hell"). It adds a Direct X9 and OpenGL mode. As well as some audio drivers that can take advantage of cards like the SB Live. Supposedly, it makes things look a bit nicer, but I'm not sure about that.

http://oldunreal.com/downloads.html

You should be able to drop it on top of your CD copies.

Turning off vsynch only yields a few more frames (close to 60). Nothing more. The poster who said it is frame limited at 60 might very well be right.

Oh nice so its an fan made update to the original game engine.
I'll give it a try later, its been awhile since I have played unreal.

I just downloaded the S3TC High End Texture files. Framerate drops into the 40s average, but it still plays pretty nice. The creator recommends a P4 or better when using the high end textures.

EDIT: I'm back up to the high 50s when I drop the resolution to 1024x768. I think I'll keep it at that. 😀

- John

This is reminding me of when I still had my BP6 box with its dual Celeron 533s set up, putting Q3A and UT through their paces vs. an Athlon XP 1800+. I'm pretty sure I used a Radeon 8500 128 MB as the BP6 system's graphics card at the time, while the XP 1800+ had its usual Radeon 9600 XT.

The Q3A demo performed buttery-smooth on the BP6 once I enabled SMP, quite possibly one of the few games to utilize more than one CPU/core well before dual-core CPUs were a common thing. IIRC, id Tech 3 also supported HT&L.

UT performed horribly on that same system, though. Couldn't maintain 60 FPS at all, didn't support SMP, and from the sound of it, Unreal Engine 1 was so Glide-optimized that they never bothered implementing HT&L, which 3dfx never supported - or, rather, didn't last long enough to support.

The Athlon XP system just ran circles around it with all that extra CPU power, to the point where I actually consider 1.5 GHz CPUs the practical minimum for good performance on UnrealEngine1. In other words, you want maximum single-threaded IPC, same as most games even today.

I didn't have my Voodoo5 5500 at the time; maybe I could throw it all back together and re-bench on Glide for kicks?

One thing I can say for certain is that the Direct3D10 renderer, which I usually prefer for the unlocked horizontal FOV and other niceties, does incur a performance penalty noticeable on notebooks with modern Intel graphics. I'm guessing it's tuned for image quality more than speed, given the power of today's gaming GPUs.

And, yes, I always make it a point to install the Old Unreal patches, if for no other reason than the glorious OpenAL audio renderer option. I really wish they could've ported that to Deus Ex as well.

Do you know offhand the difference between the different audio renderers? Does OpenAL make that much of a difference?

Mau1wurf1977 surely doesn't use any modern patch/engine for this video, wouldn't make sense in Glide mode.
When combining a P4 2.4 and a single Voodoo2 then the Voodoo2 is probably the bottleneck, even in a game with high CPU demands like Unreal. I suppose the game would run just as fast with a Tualatin. I don't think the performance of your E-350 is the real issue here.

Some quotes from Oldunreal's Wiki:

After installing 227 it's all laggy / bad performance
"The new shadows may eat up a lot of CPU, even on nowadays machines, and get top notch computers to their knees. The related settings to use Projectors instead of Decals also need more power. ..."

http://www.oldunreal.com/wiki/index.php?title … L_/_D3D8_/_D3D9
"- FrameRateLimit - [Integer]
CPU controlled frame rate limiter in frames per second. Set to 0 to disable."

Yes I use the plain Unreal Gold. With a second V2 in SLI, on a P3 1.4 GHz, the fps nearly double:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/94628483/ … g%20project.pdf

check page 12.