First post, by ruthan
- Rank
- Oldbie
This post is WIP - Work in progress it would be updated, with new info.
If you are not in mood to read ( Someone was born to read, someone to lead:) :
1), here is results link - html view
2) If you wan to benchmark, download Phils DosBench, PathBench (download link is in 1st post) from vvbee , here is VideoBios size utility from FalcoSoft and for Quake2 would need own Quake2 retail data + Q2DOS or this Q2DOS + Q2 single demo testing package . Fastvid (its lite package no vspeed.exe etc..) and MTRR speed enhancers are already in Phils pack, to change resolutions in Quake games use ingame options - its more safe that videomodes numbers because there are cards specific and some cards as S3 support some strange resolutions so, generic 640x480,1024x768 numbers actually trigger lesser resolutions, so automatic scrips are not working.
Magic lines for Quake consoles (opens with tilda key - ~):
Quake1: Timedemo demo1 <presss ENTER> If you have blinking screen problem (some Nvidia cards problem), tryvid_nopageflip 1 or vid_wait 0 - console command - all characters has to be lowercase, after command execution you have change resolution to take settings effect [urlhttps://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=709331#p709331] Be aware that vid_nopageflip 1 is saved in game configuration even between game execution, so if want to do "standard" testing you need to set it back to 0 by vid_nopageflip 0 and change resolution
to make it workingDetail explanation how it works[/url] thx FalcoSoft.
Quake2:
open console
Timedemo 1 <presss ENTER>
map demo1.dm2 <presss ENTER>// For Full version of games
map Q2Demo1.dm2 <press ENTER> // For Q2 Single player demo, demo has different end, but fps is by my testing ~ same
Results are in console.
I prefer full line of results, if you own Quake2, otherwise all other used tools are free, so there is not excuse - crash is valid result too, if results is slideshow (<3 FPS), you can quit benchmark and give me forecast of speed (Q2 reports results for part of benchmark, Q1 you can stop benchmark by run benchmark command from console again and you will find results from last incomplete run in console (benchmark performance is pretty consistent so its not big deal you benchmark only part of it), Doom running on everything). For 3dfx cards use software mode, DOS Glide results cant be posted as additional info. !DONT use Windows 9x DOS mode, only pure DOS! . You can post Virtual machine / DosBox results too with info about physical hw + DOS version or used virtualization tool (i know Vmware and Virtual DOS sounds is broken, i dunno about QEMU, ESX and other more obscure engines..). If you machine overclocked, pleas report stock and overclocked clocks (i dont mean results just something like Core 2 Duo E6660 2.4Ghz @3.5 GHz). You can use any version of DOS - FreeDOS, DR-DOS, older MS-DOS only pleas report it, FASTVID regarding of its documentation is working only in Realmode (=himem.sys / himemX.exe only no EMM386/JEMM/QEMM etc..) and Q2DOS has up to 4x faster results in Realmode than in EMS mode (NO EMS mode has very similar results).
3) If you have problem to run pure DOS on your machine look here.
Hell ou,
Phil has some nice DOS benchmarks for some PCI and AGP cards, but i wonder about performance on more modern PCIE/ Radeon AGP 3850 / Geforce 520 PCI etc.. cards on system as X58,intel X6X, i865, newest VIA chipsets etc.. but are also pure DOS compatible. I prefer real game test against synthetic benchmarks. Did someone these test?
Discussion / target - which things would be also interesting to discover:
1) which more modern Videocards are glitchless in DOS and which arent (i added any incompatibility note which i met to my Sound cards compatibility testing i can migrate them to special sheet later, i tested lots of games on lots of videocards in process) For now you can usethis matrix for older cards.
2) How more modern videocards which are starting in underclocked speed, until proper speed is initialized by drivers would compared to older cards. . => Some of them performance same or better than older cards.
3) What is exactly 2D performance of more modern card, i saw some Win98 results and because of removing 2D acceleration features some modern graphics card performance was lame.. => Some of them performance same or better than older cards.
4) Discover if DOS videocards speed up utilities are working for modern cards => look at my results, there are very results with and without speed up utility
5) Could Vesa enhancers fix broken default vesa glithces and its possible to make them working on more modern card? Its Univbe thing, i still dont fully understand it, i even used it properly. Even back in era when i used DOS i had cards, which just worked.
6) What is best videocard for Quake 1-1600x1200? => Well 1600x1200 is not supported, Quake ends with 1280x1024.. what is 5:4, so im rather testing 1024.
8) I remember that at some period was possible change videocards frequencies through Bios flashing, wouldnt be possible to change that too slow clocks for default boot for some modern card, to improve their pure DOS performance?
9) If exist some Build engine benchmark i will add it to results..
10) Which is fastest Dos videocard? => If only take to consideration games in our benchmarking suite it would some highend of Radeon HD from 4xxx to 7xxx line, because performance in not based only on raw power, i cant tell for sure, what card would be the best without results, but my guess with that would be HD 7990 - its 375W TDP monster vacuum cleaner.. but i probably some card with 35-50W TDP would have 80-90% of its performance.
Analysis:
- I found some results, here is -Vogons thread.
- Phils DOS bench results DB - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lvF9n … wpNU/edit#gid=0 and Vogons thread
Structure - there is only problem that its a bit over engineered, CPU info is far on right and cpu info far on left and if was some videocard or cpu enhancer used is on righ collumn.. Simply with Phils sheet you have to do much scrolling as from left to right to discover what was how tested, i wanted to have all important performance parameters on the left and all collums on 1 monitor screen and hide syntetic benchmarks, sorted it by Quake performance test. Merge stock and overclocking results. Results is here: // But because its copy, i will be quickly outdated, i did it for myself in 15 minutes, to create this analysis, maybe it could help other people..
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PPPOD … 343A/edit#gid=0
Data - much more severe problem, is that Quake in 320x200 results in hunders of FPS, is not good to tell you about performance in high resultions as 640x480 or 1024x768.. and for such machines is pure nonsense to use 320x200, what is difference between 200,300,500 FPS.. and what for is such results if in 640x480 or in 1024x768 you have less than 30 FPS?
Some results Phils sheet data Quake 320x200 - its not ideal source of info for high resolution prediction, but lets use them:
- im ignoring Doom results, because Quake number seems to be a bit more conclusive.. a make IMHO more sense to reflect system performance
- fastest cards, ordered from fastest to a bit slower (of course that there is CPU influence of results, but even best CPU cant push slow cards, ro simply i selected fastest achieved results):
- Radeon 48xx (1170 FPS),54xx (940), 5670 (722), 5770 (880),5750 (1090) - 7xxx (700) PCI-e 475-1130 FPS, here is seems that these cards have some performance head room and result is CPU depended
- Radeon X800 XT tested, so i expect that X850 would be same or even better - 930 FPS
- here i add my new result Vooodoo 3 2000 - without FastVID on Core E6600 - 550 FPS
- here i add my new result Matrox Mystique 4 MB - 511 FPS with Core E6300 (slowest Core 2 Duo)
- Radeon 9550-9800 AGP/PCI-e - 400 -480 FPS // = X600 because is simply almost renamed X9800..
- Radeon X800 XL - 440 FPS
- Mobility Radeon X700 - 440 FPS
- Geforce 7900 GTX - 430 FPS
- Radeon X800 Pro - 420 FPS
- Radeon 8500 - 400 FPS
- Radeon X1950 - 400 FPS
- Geforce 3 TI / Geforce 5900XT / Geforce MX440/ Riva TN2 M64 (yeah slimer..), Geforce 9800 GTX+ - 350-400 FPS // Nvidia time
- Intel HD in CPU (Pentium G620) / Intel Core i7-3770 - 325 FPS
Conclusions from Phils project results (2018, check online sheet for up to date results):
- fastest cards - AMD/ATI cards are clear winners
- from results is can say that Phils Quake results - 320x200 is document called ultimate videocard benchmark is i reality CPU benchmark, because i lowres results it really scale with CPU with same work at unless you are using slower old videocards (1 MB video card or something like that even with 4 MB Matrox or Voodoo3 - they are capped around 500 FPS, slower older cards 100-300 FPS), you can see that results for 640x480, 1024x768 etc.. have very similar results regardless of CPU, so these would really Videocard benchmark..
- its quite interesting that best DOS performers arent Win98 compatible, so i want to multiboot machine, you have to do some compromise, or you need Gigabyte / HP OEM boards with primary PCI-E selection.. If want cream de la cream - best multiboot wet dream machine (i will now ignore videocards DOS compatibility some fastest cards can have some DOS games compatibility problem like srolling etc..) - configuration will look like this:
DOS - Radeon 4890 / Win98 - Radeon X850 / XP - Geforce first Titan / Win7- Win10- Geforce 2080 Ti, of course if you care about noise and power consumation is better something like this:
DOS - Radeon 5450 ( there are card with passive cooling) / Win98 - Radeon X800 (there passivelly cooled cards) / XP - 750 TI (there are also in KalmX passively cooler) / Geforce 2070 / 2080.. other solution would be water cooling ring with 1slot watercooling blocks.
- fastest cards are PCIE, other AGP and PCI cards cca 3x Slower (Update: lower i achieved better results with faster CPU, not is not so big deal 350 vs 500 FPS) that best PCie card:
best PCI cards are for now MGA 1064SG (340FPS). A bit Slower is S3 VirgeDX (300 FPS), S3Trio64V+ (250), Vooodoo 5 5000 PCI
- what is big problem with Phils results for Quake you cant really translate 320x200 performance to higher resolutions, because with Geforce 220 - i have 300+ FPS in 320x200, but only 12 FPS in 640x480 and 4 FPS in 1024x768. Natural scaling if anything would work as expected, lets say linearly with number of pixels would be something like that - 320x200-300 FPS; 640x480 - 300/4.8= ~62;1024x768=300/12=25 FPS.
- its seems that performance of modern Nvidia cards in DOS sucks in comparision with ATI for low res- Geforce 640GT - 320 FPS, Geforce 660 - 320,, i know that even 120 FPS is enough for high end LCD/CRT, but dont for just numbers comparision.
- lots of very old cards can be really pushed a lot in small resolution by fast CPU, it should that there engine are very effective or they dont do much
- fastest AGP card in test was Radeon 9600SE - 482 FPS, maybe because i didnt find any X8xx AGP in test, R 9600 SE i bit slower that even fastest PCI cards, but could be problem with used CPU power, because it was tested with P4 3.6 HT only.
My results, in other words, i keep Doom 320x200 + Quake 320x200 for results "mapping"+ added 640x480/1024x768 + Quake 2 DOS port - 640x480 / 1024x768 /1600x1200:
My measurements with few reused numbers from Phils video, before i discover his sheet:
https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.do?rid= … c62b9&mode=html
Conclusions from my sheets project:
- first of all, graphics enhancers utilities are working with most of cards, at least for some combination of resolution and game - most often with Quake1 (for which is there even additional VID_NOPAGEFLIP 1 speed hack to bypass v-synch shenanigans), less often with Quake 2, much less often for Doom and Doom boost is relatively small, in comparision with them, for Quake they could give you 20! times more performance in some causes, its brutal, almost unheard as i bit shame that such thing in not used by Microsoft and inbuild in MS-DOS nativelly.
- Doom performance on lots of modern, quick cards simply sucks and enhancers are not cure, what is very strange in comparision with old PCI 1-2MB cards, which all are 60 FPS+ for Doom.
- if you dont have fast modern machine, there is performance advantage between real dos machine and Dosbox
- what i dont really understand is that some cards are faster in 1024x768 than with 640x480 in Quake on lots of cards, only conclusion is that Quake or its inbuld vesa drivers are bugged, i dont believe that there is something in chips architectures what cause this - like dynamic overclocking or i thing that almost all modern card are in DOS using its booting minimal idle clock, which are cant be triggered by some DOS code and for better clocks are needed OS drivers. => Update: VID_NOPAGEFLIP 1 is probably cure, more testing needed.. - there could be V-Sync FPS cap with some cards and resolutions, details are here by FalcoSoft
- FalcoSoft about DOS refresh rate and FPS cap: Your monitor's specification does not matter here. Under DOS all SVGA/VESA modes are limited to 60 Hz unless the VESA BIOS supports VESA3 refresh rate setting functions. Unfortunately NVidia disabled these refresh rate settings more than a decade ago (last working versions were Geforce 4 series cards AFAIK and other vendors never supported it). But none of the known games supported VESA 3 refresh rate settings by default. You had to set 60+ Hz refresh rates manually with a special utility - UniRefresh.
- i dont have explanation for X58 Xeon56xx results its much faster cpu and ram than Core 2 Duo systems, 320x200 results is fine, but 640x480 or 1024x768 are very slow regardless of card for PCI. Only problem which i can see is that my machine have poor DOS HDD performance 3 MB/s for integrated Sata controller in IDE, i didnt care because its DOS and its enough for it, but i dunno how is Quake loading texture, is there are loaded before benchmark or there are constantly download and unloading from Storage, because that would means that benchmark is very storage speed depend. I have to try some Ramdisk and compare results (with whole Dosbench on Ramdisk results are still the same, only PC speaker get constant beep when i run benchmark from Ramdrive). I dont have a clue, instructions should be backwards compatible, maybe some problem with some HP O.E.M board implemetation.. but im confused. X56xx card resonable performance only with Matrox Mystique 4 MB and even that, even much faster CPU and memory (DDR3 1333 vs DDR2 667 ) is much slower that slowest Core 2 Duo - 30 vs 57 FPS in 1024x768.
- its seems that number of Stream processors on AMD cards really doesnt matter for DOS, important probably other 2D processing part of chip and its clocks and memory clocks (or lets say its default boot clock which are used for DOS)
- with very fast single thread CPU like 8700K at stock clock, i have with Vmware in every benchmark 100+ FPS, so i looks like winner, that we can throw away old machine, unfortunately Vmware and Virtualbox DOS sound cards drivers suck a lot and FX and FM are not working both together, Vmware pushing other things, so unless someone write own new driver this is now way, way is maybe with other MBs.. pass through some PCI sound card, but i far i know passthrough has only Vmware ESX and its hassle and i dunno it properly working for sound cards.. Even with 8700K is not Dosbox fast enough for max. resolution Dos Q1/Q2 gaming.
- we now have Radeon HD results for 1280x1024 and these cards are really fast also for this results at least in Quake 1, we already knew about 320x200, there are lots of cards with brutal 320x200 Quake 1 performance, but there are quickly lossing performance with resolutions, Radeons HD dont..
- other interesting thing is that Q2 is in general much faster in same resolution than Q1, logic would expect otherwise because Q2 is fully 3D and there are more effect, but Q2 engine could be simply better or Q2DOS has some good speed hacks.
Submit your results and help community:
- you at start of this post how to..
- It would be nice if Phil will add columns for higher resolution to his sheet, but don fear of duplicity, i promise that i would migrate all your results from here to his sheet..
Additional info
- list of DOS games with inbuild FPS counter and how to enable it
- best Windows 98 AGP card thread-- Rayers utility for disable on-chip scaling on nVidia VGA in DOS - its about DVI picture sharpness
- Windows performance of PCI cards up to newest - Youtube video.
- S3 Dos picture too bright problem thread - its VBios ROM problem
Additional tools
- VSPEED.EXE that reports the video - throughput for bit blit operations from DRAM to VRAM for both the banked VGA and linear frame buffer mechanisms. There is more info about FastVId and Vspeed.
- Screamer 2 and its demo + Screamer rally at the start of their setup, testing testing videocard speed - there is some result in MB/s is some videocard transfer rate, rate is better.
- DosTest packages from Roy Longbottom (icnluded in my DriversAndTools Package directory DOSTESTS) - Videodos and dosbus benchmarks, which can measure, memory bus and videocard performace in 640/800/1024
- On some card is possible to discover boot / DOS clocks on Windows, more details are here from FalcoSoft, linked NiBiTor is Nvidia only and support up to Nvidia PCI-E 590 GTX from Geforce 5 or something like that. I also can change boot (DOS) clocks, for cards which have multiple power / speed states.
- Here some Doom only results measured by someone outside of Vogons.
Vbios size:
- For most and possible available pure Dos conventional memory is good to have smaller videobios as possible, it a bit problem on modern videocards, especially if UMBPCI is not working with you MB (and its only for realmode, so it will not fix EMS mode) i created thread about that:
here , you can report it too, i added column for it in our sheet too.
List of DOS highres games where performance could matter:
link
Videocards Compatibility (here im mainly gather some material for compatibility research and no i dont to do all by myself, i head that exists something like community..):
- compatibility matrix with old cards (up to Voodoo 5 and similar) - https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
- you can find lots of info about videocards incompatibilities as side product of my modern chipsets + sound card testing, all its in notes columns (maybe sometime will someone transform it in to some unified text block)
- Radeon HD AGP glitches thx to LSS10999 for info - Vogons link
- NVIDIA Maxwell2/Pascal Vesa bug - info from FalcoSoft, there is also fix for Geforce 960 (maybe more) WinXP DOS VESA/VGA modes- NVIDIA Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal VESA Bios Bug (workaround found) . I simulated it with G970 and G1030. Same of similar bug has even Gefore 6xx / 7xx line. Rayer and FalcoSoft are working on fix.
- free Univbe release - Vogons drivers library - http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=346
- its not DOS thing, but consider DOS/Win9x combo card (because who has enough slots, especially with two slots cards), there is Win9x DOS mode full gub with Geforce 4/5/6/7 cards, details
- Tip by AvanlonH I always test the DOS compatibility of all my AGP and PCI-E graphics cards by running Rambo 3 (1988) in the same setup. Running 'Rambo.exe' or 'Rambo.exe r' (game setup option) will crash the system using both these cards. Plugging in an old 1994 PCI Diamond Stealth 64 2MB (S3 Vision964) and it works. This game will not work with most modern cards. Failing cards: FX5200, 4200ti, NVS 280, NVS 300, AMD HD4770.
Thread about how to measure framerate in DOS games would FPS counter
- its out of scope of my benchmarking, its more work, but it could help to analyze performance in games without inbuild benchmarking tools..
- VGA capture thread 28 pages of info..
- how to capture resolution bellow 640x480 with Aver cards..
Most interesting yet untested cards - test them if you have them..
- Kyro II, Riva 128/TNT/TNT2/TNT2 ultra, Geforce 1/3, Vooodoo 4/5, Radeon X850, Radeon HD 2xxx,Radeon HD 5xxx,Radeon HD 6xxx, Radeon HD7xxx, more modern Matroxes like G200/G400, Intel MB Videocards, Geforce 750 / 750 Ti (especially Q1 1280x1024 if it blinking as Gerforce 9xx/1xxx).
- also would be nice test some already tested cards with slower / faster CPUs, to discover how their performance scale.
My similar threads:
DOS PCI soundcards with modern chipsets. + branched configs and drivers and tools package
DOS Network cards and networking - some modern Gigabit PCI/PCI-E working fine in DOS
PCI Video cards benchmark: Electric Boogaloo Edition - Similar create after this thread
Disclaimer:
As you probably find out, im not good with letters+grammar in every language, i never had brain for that, i was always better with numbers and analytics, sorry. If something in text is not clear, just ask, i will fix it.
Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.