Yeah, you need to use FASTVID and you should be good to go.

A video card supporting VESA 2.0/3.0 natively helps

what graphics? you need to use all those funky tools to speedup data transfers also; with g200 someone did 30 fps on a p200 here iirc;

Fastvid really helps!
P4 3 GHz with fastvid gets to 83 FPS
Video card is Nvidia GeForce 6600

Can you recommend me a specific config for fastvid or should I use a different software?

For older hardware ask in Marvin.

Moved to Marvin -> Software.

I think collector and stiletto have around 2000 collective posts telling people to go to Marvin.

I'm sorry for posting in the wrong forum.

Anyway, for those who care and helped, I finally played all Quake with fastvid without any problems, flawlessly. It looks great at 800x600. Fastvid really makes a difference for high resolution playing in pure DOS. I'll start evangelizing about its benefits.

tauro wrote:

I'm sorry for posting in the wrong forum.

Anyway, for those who care and helped, I finally played all Quake with fastvid without any problems, flawlessly. It looks great at 800x600. Fastvid really makes a difference for high resolution playing in pure DOS. I'll start evangelizing about its benefits.

Having Quake "run on all of its 8 cylinders" on a fast CPU is quite a satisfying experience.

tauro wrote:

I'm sorry for posting in the wrong forum.

Anyway, for those who care and helped, I finally played all Quake with fastvid without any problems, flawlessly. It looks great at 800x600. Fastvid really makes a difference for high resolution playing in pure DOS. I'll start evangelizing about its benefits.

Most P4s have the USWC option already in BIOS. So its more like a misconfiguration when not enabled.

It is indeed very satisfying to have it running so smoothly and in high res, it's charming.

I ended up using the P3-1.4S + MSI 694T + Voodoo3 3000 8 MB + SB16:
Fastvid 800x600 = 74,3 FPS

The P4 let me down:
P4 3GHz + ASUS P4P800-E + NVIDIA 6600 256 MB + SB Live SB0100
Fastvid 800x600 = 58.5 FPS

elianda wrote:

Most P4s have the USWC option already in BIOS. So its more like a misconfiguration when not enabled.

Please tell me what would the BIOS option be? I see no reference to WC, MTTR or anything alike.

Could be that the 6600 is holding you back on the Pentium 4. AFAIR GeForce cards after GeForce3 had much slower VESA performance.

Hey thank you man, I'll be doing some tests with that info

I reviewed quite a few Slot 1 CPUs, and I believe around a Pentium II 400 or 450 you reach 60 fps in the timedemo. I used a GeForce2 type card.

Thank you all for your input. So I did some tests with my video cards in this P4 build, and these are my results:

AGP

Voodoo 3 doesn't fit in the AGP slot
MX400 64 MB fastvid doesn't start and computer hangs
TNT M64 32 MB fastvid doesn't start and computer hangs

Geforce4 MX 4000 64 MB with fastvid
800x600 128.3 FPS
1024x768 94,5 FPS
1280x1024 50,4 FPS
Clearly the AGP winner

PCI

SIS6326 8 MB fastvid doesn't start and computer hangs. Without it, FPS are very low.
S3 Virge/DX 4 MB fastvid doesn't start and computer hangs. Without it, FPS aren't noteworthy.
Other PCI cards I have, from S3 and Trident don't even rank.

Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446-HC-A 1 MB (no fastvid)
800x600 81,4 FPS
1024x768 49,1 FPS

I added 1 extra MB to this card and it turned out to be considerable slower. But the possible resolutions increase (up to 1280x1024)

Final round of tests with the P3:

P3

AGP

Voodoo3 16 MB with fastvid
800x600 74,3 FPS

Geforce 6600 256 MB with fastvid
800x600 46,3 FPS
1024x768 30,3 FPS

Geforce4 MX 4000 64 MB with fastvid
800x600 72 FPS
1024x768 49,2 FPS
1280x1024 26,4 FPS

TNT2 M64 32 MB with fastvid
800x600 75 FPS
1024x768 50,6 FPS

MX400 64 MB with fastvid
800x600 74,8 FPS
1024x768 50,4 FPS

PCI

Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446-HC-A 1 MB (no fastvid)
800x600 53,0 FPS
1024x768 32,1 FPS

Maybe next step would be re-do the P4 tests with a different 478-motherboard. It's strange why some video-cards simply didn't work with fastvid and the system froze.