VOGONS


First post, by pentiumspeed

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I wonder what list of games that becomes too much for Pentium 133 with S3 PCI card. Where AGP video card becomes a necessary and PII or PIII class for this?

Just wondering.
Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 1 of 12, by Baoran

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First game that comes to my mind is quake if you want to play on higher resolutions.
Same with duke nukem 3d and blood at higher resolutions.

It isn't about the video card in dos thought. It is generally about the cpu because they do rendering in software, so increase in resolution increases cpu load a lot.
I don't remember any games that you would not be able to play using the pentium you mentioned because it would not be fast enough (It will be too fast for some games though) if you don't care about the higher resolutions.

Reply 2 of 12, by gdjacobs

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Janes USNF
Janes ATF
Battlespire
Extreme Assault
Armored Fist 2
Build games at high detail/high resolution

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 3 of 12, by DeadnightWarrior

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I had the same CPU and I clearly remember Quake I being somehow playable but very slow and Hexen II being a real nightmare to run. The least I had to do was upgrade from 16 to 32Mb of ram but Hexen II was still borderline.

Reply 4 of 12, by The Serpent Rider

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Where AGP video card becomes a necessary and PII or PIII class for this?

Pentium III Coppermine 500 or better for anything late DOS.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 5 of 12, by amadeus777999

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Anything starting at 640x480(quadruppled 320x240 screenspace) might give the 133 problems since it's all cpu dependent(leaving out DOS Voodoo titles where I do not know how much of an offload was possible).
Quake was often surprising users left and right back then when they saw their slow 2D cards score as slow as much faster ones due to their cpu being too weak to deliver a rate where the differences would matter.

Best to test the AGP / PCI gap on a fast P4 system(+fastvid)... I guess the P133 is not a good candidate here. Including scenes where tranlucencies are shown could bring out odd results.

Reply 7 of 12, by Standard Def Steve

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I think Screamer 2 in SVGA struggled to maintain 60 fps even on my PIII-550 (katmai). Installing a Celeron-1400 on a Slocket fixed that issue right up. Not sure what the "minimum" CPU requirement would have been for a constant 60 fps. I'm guessing PIII-800ish. Course, Screamer 2 SVGA is the most demanding DOS game in my collection - I'm not sure if there are any titles that demand even more CPU power (not counting games like Duke 3D or Quake running at asinine resolutions, of course).

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
Tualatin: PIII-S @ 1628MHz | QDI Advance 12T | 2GB DDR-310 | 6800GT | X-Fi | 500GB HDD | 3DMark01: 14,059
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Reply 8 of 12, by DNSDies

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There was this neat thread in 2009 where people were benchmarking DOS games on beefy systems:
Most demanding DOS game, resource wise?

Janes ATF, and Quake & Redneck Rampage at ludicrous resolutions seems to be quite CPU intensive.

Reply 9 of 12, by The Serpent Rider

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Athlon XP 3000+ / Pentium 4 3.06 with GeForce 2 AGP or higher should be a safe bet for super heavy DOS. There's still a room for improvements though.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 10 of 12, by gdjacobs

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The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-01-27, 17:46:

Athlon XP 3000+ / Pentium 4 3.06 with GeForce 2 AGP or higher should be a safe bet for super heavy DOS. There's still a room for improvements though.

MTRR and FastVid tricks are important as well.

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Reply 11 of 12, by clueless1

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I would argue that any DOS game in VGA (320x200ish) would play fine on that system. Most games that offer an SVGA mode will not play fine on the same system. Exceptions are graphic adventures that use SVGA since there's generally very little movement/animation in graphic adventures. For example, Eric the Unready. The graphics are pretty much static art, so would play fine even on a 486-class PC. Once pixels start getting pushed, though, it really taxes the cpu.

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OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
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Reply 12 of 12, by The Serpent Rider

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MTRR and FastVid tricks are important as well.

I've taken that into consideration. Setup above will allow to play Blood at 1600x1200 resolution fairly smoothly.

Exceptions are graphic adventures that use SVGA since there's generally very little movement/animation in graphic adventures.

Any 2D RTS should be fine too. KKND and Warcraft II (DOS) will be super smooth. Heck, Starcraft and Diablo are playable on 486DX4, albeit not smooth.
There are some exceptions for 3D stuff too. Little Big Adventure 2 works remarkably well in open 3D world, probably due to static camera.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.