Why not use a NVIDIA RIVA card instead of an ISA card? You should be able to get a much better framerate. Also Doom doesn't go 60 FPS unless you're using source ports I think.
Ok, not really able to find any info on that card. I did see one other identical card on eBay but it didn't list the brand and there wasn't anything else to help identify it either.
In any case, I'm going to be going through my socket 3 and socket 7 stuff to get rid of what I don't need and have a massive number of video cards to test as well, including a number of ISA ET4000 based cards.
On another note, one thing I did notice back in the day was that ISA sound cards had a detrimental effect on the speed of games in Socket 7 and newer systems with PCI.
Switch to a PCI sound card and the performance went up quite a bit.
I never had a 486 setup with PCI back then so I never was able to test that. Now I have a few 486 boards with PCI and I wonder if the same is true with those chipsets.
wrote:vga card is ISA, tseng et4000ax, one of the fastest. But don't tell me ISA is the reason, because a 486dx2-66mhz with 8mb ram and et4000ax vga does better than 21fps. pentium 200 is triple the clock plus superscalar, ~5 times faster on raw cpu power. Now, accounting for same vga speed on both, my system should have been ~x3 faster, at least 60 fps.
L1 and L2 are enabled.
Do you have a picture and model details for your ET4000AX ISA card. There are many slowdown tricks with certain cards, which can have extreme desired/ undesired outcomes. For example, you can switch it to an 8 bit bus mode for extreme slowdown.
wrote:wrote:vga card is ISA, tseng et4000ax, one of the fastest. But don't tell me ISA is the reason, because a 486dx2-66mhz with 8mb ram and et4000ax vga does better than 21fps. pentium 200 is triple the clock plus superscalar, ~5 times faster on raw cpu power. Now, accounting for same vga speed on both, my system should have been ~x3 faster, at least 60 fps.
L1 and L2 are enabled.
Do you have a picture and model details for your ET4000AX ISA card. There are many slowdown tricks with certain cards, which can have extreme desired/ undesired outcomes. For example, you can switch it to an 8 bit bus mode for extreme slowdown.
Have you tried using TH99 to identify the card:
http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/
Also, there is a DOS utility program called DMODE.EXE that can override jumper settings. It should be available somewhere on the net, don't have an immediate link. You can then alter settings that can have a significant impact on speed.
Also, the video card on an ISA bus can still be significantly faster on Socket 7, but it will still be 'GPU' limited and speeds plateau after a certain CPU speed. Still, you should attain speeds faster than a Socket 3 system.
I'll edit this post as I test more:
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First setup:
Motherboard:
ASUS P5A-B - BIOS settings default except for I/O recovery time and motherboard cache is disabled because it will not work above 110Mhz fsb with the K6-2+. See below for very slight difference in fps with it enabled.
CPU:
AMD K6-2+ 550 @ 120x5.5 (system POST screen says 659Mhz)
RAM:
256MB PC-133
VGA:
Tseng ET4000AX ISA 1MB VRAM with turbo jumper set to BOTH (which means both vga and RAM) -unknown brand
18.41
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CPU speed changed to 550Mhz (100x5.5)
17.75
with motherboard cache enabled
17.76
disabled "turbo" via the jumper on the video card:
12.23
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(disabled motherboard cache)
PCI ATI MACH64
80.311
AGP Permedia II 8MB
(disabled motherboard cache)
132.66
(enabled motherboard cache)
137.55
AGP Intel i740
122.04
PCI ARK PV2000
104.17
PCI nVidia Riva 128
103.16
PCI Tseng ET6000
107.93
PCI Geforce FX5200
55.82 - ewwwww
PCI S3 Trio64V+
87.25
PCI Number 9 Imagine 128 II (CL5424 for VGA)
41.21
PCI ATI Radeon 9250 256MB
76.29
PCI Weitek 9100
26.84
PCI Permedia 2V
85.06
PCI Genoa Phantom 3D (anybody know what chipset this uses? Not finding any info online with a quick search)
88.70
ISA Orchid Prodesigner II (another Tseng ET4000AX)
12.22 - looks like the turbo mode on my other card is very nice
PCI TNT2 M64
103.88
AGP TNT2 M64
155.92
AGP ATI Rage Pro Turbo
143.91
PCI MediaGraphics 3D 64 OTI6464217
50.36
AGP Geforce 2 MX-200
155.92 - am I being CPU limited now? See TNT2 M64 above - same exact score.
PCI S3 Vision 928
80.48
AGP Geforce 3 Ti-200 Pro - yeah.. haveta be CPU limited now.
155.92
AGP Ensoniq 3dfx Voodoo Banshee
147.02
PCI 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000
91.53
PCI 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000
91.53
AGP 3dfx Voodoo 3 1000
147.31 - definitely a situation where AGP makes a difference with 3dfx cards.
AGP 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000D (whatever the D stands for)
147.60
AGP Hercules Prophet 4500 (PowerVR Kyro II)
142.81
AGP SIS 6326
124.89
AGP ATI Radeon 8500LE
127.24
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Changed to 100x6 - 600Mhz
PCI 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000D
92.09
AGP 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000
149.97
AGP Geforce 3 Ti-200 Pro
159.25
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Changed to 110x5.5 (supposed to be 605 but reported as 617 so maybe it is really 112fsb)
PCI 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000D
101.61
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think OP's expectations of ISA based video cards is a little bit, well, non-achievable. There is no ISA based video card in the world on which DOOM is going to run smoothly in full screen. Every ISA based video card I have run DOOM on I had to run it in a postage stamp size frame to get a decent frame rate and this includes the ET4000.
Yes, ET4000 is a super fast card, that is, the VLB and PCI versions of it. Why? As others have pointed out, ISA bus is the bottleneck.
Coincidentally I happen to have the ISA, VLB and PCI versions of the ET4000 and I have no system in which the ET4000 ISA can run DOOM in any capacity other than postage stamp frame size. There is no amount of CPU power that is going to fix this.
The slowest system on which I can run DOOM smoothly in full screen with high settings is my 486DX-40 with the ET4000 VLB.
My cards:
