ibm5155 wrote:

Acording to this website:http://www.podracers.com/sysreqs.html

Dang, that site is still online. It's 16 years old...

given that the game was made in 1999, I'd imagine it would preform alot better on say a Pentium II/AMD K6-2 than a Pentium 1 class system

could it be your soundcard being isa would be unlikely to support directsound

I thought the same thing, but disabling sound ingame just gave me 3 to 4 fps, still not a huge help to reach 18 to 30fps...

Maybe a pci sound card with acelerated hardware (I think A3D?) would help on this case?

For me, it's like that first tomb raider that required Hardware T&L, without it, you must need a pentium IV 1,4GHz, but if your gpu supported it, you could play it fine over a pentium iii 1GHz.

I have something that is making it more slow if you play this on Windows 9x on DOSbox.

You know when I was testing this game on Windows 95 by using DOSbox SVN. And I noticed during the race the CPU racers were going around circles in and out of the track I tried crashing and the game froze. And some times it happens when I don't crash.

I don't have any footage of the crashing and racers going around in circles part but here is the footage with no crashing. Ani keeps speeding down the track and the game freezes.

Please reply to me if anyone knows how to fix this issue I am going through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=654gvfbMG0I

that has nothing to do with real system problems
AND DON'T USE DOSBOX FOR WIN9X GAMES

BTW have you ran dxdiag and disabled AGP texture acceleration?

Yes.

I heard that a Voodoo 2 would perform better on that system, maybe with that (if the game support it) I could get some extra fps? and would be a problem if I used the voodoo 2 + 3 together (the 3 for 2D)

ibm5155 wrote:

I heard that a Voodoo 2 would perform better on that system, maybe with that (if the game support it) I could get some extra fps? and would be a problem if I used the voodoo 2 + 3 together (the 3 for 2D)

As far as I know it COULD work but probably not. It'd be better to pair the Voodoo 2 with a Trio64. But I'm not entirely sure, someone else here could probably give a better answer.

You CAN use a Voodoo2 with a Voodoo3. I've done it before, installing V2 drivers first then V3 after. The Voodoo2 can still work if you supply its Glide dlls to certain games, however given that this is the Direct3D HAL Racer works with, that's not going to work AFAIK

and I cannot see any technical reason how a Voodoo3 could run Racer slower than V2. I highly suspect the performance issue is cache related, you should be seeing at least 20fps with those specs

leileilol wrote:

You CAN use a Voodoo2 with a Voodoo3. I've done it before, installing V2 drivers first then V3 after. The Voodoo2 can still work if you supply its Glide dlls to certain games, however given that this is the Direct3D HAL Racer works with, that's not going to work AFAIK

and I cannot see any technical reason how a Voodoo3 could run Racer slower than V2. I highly suspect the performance issue is cache related, you should be seeing at least 20fps with those specs

Huh, today I learned. Thanks!

hmm I see.
Well, for me I only thinked it was weird, Like a 200MHz processor is recommended, so I with that I could play at least with 30fps almost all the time, unless they were talking about a pentium II 200MHz or a pentium pro I think (Or 20fps was fine on that year)...

About the CACHE, I can disable it to test, the motherboard has 1mb of l2 cache, with my pong game, there was a small percentage of performance increase.
it was like 1500fps without l2 cache and 1700fps with l2 cache (300fps without l1 and l2 cache).

The question about voodoo 2 is that it's older, and may could run faster... but acording to This video, it looks like the same performance as my computer.

Crap, why did I gave up of my pentium 3 1GHz, at least I saved the ati radeon 7200

Have you tried with less RAM i.e. 32mb? Could be a weird motherboard quirk or something

@leileilol: That's a good point, the cacheable area might be restricted to 64MB so the machine might run faster with less memory. OTOH Intel VX/TX mainboards didn't have 1MB L2 cache IIRC.

That's the motherboard : http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboard … _d/MSI/MS-5184/
well, I would need to get a 64mb sdram first, or, take a k6-3+ and the problem would be solved...

Hmm can I limit the ram to 64mb even if it's a 128mb memory?

EDIT: Wow, actually, a K6-III is expencive 😳, I better try the 64mb sdram, so, should I get 2x32mb sram or 64mbsdram?

MVP3 with 1MB L2 cache should cache 127MB in write back mode and 255MB in write through mode. That shouldn't be the problem. You could verify that with some diagnostic tool, for example CTCM (see http://www.heise.de/download/ctcm-111825.html or http://web.info.uvt.ro/~lcucu/htmldocs/toms/ctcm.html).
[EDIT] Could you do a benchmark with a more common game so we know if there really is an issue? Maybe Pod Racer is just CPU hungry.
{EDIT2] For a small boost you could switch to a higher FSB. A PMMX 233 should run fine at 2x100MHz, probably at 2.5x100MHz. (250MHz is only a 17MHz overclock.) This is assuming your RAM is at least PC100, but a suppose a 128MB module is faster than PC66.

The ram came from my old pentium 3 1GHz machine, If I remember it was a PC133.
I Can do do a benchmark on Doom, Quake II, MDK, MDK2 (a bit slow, but I was expecting it since it's a "new" game), 3Dmark99.
For now I only remember quake 2 timedemo demo1 score (38fps with sound, 40fps without sound)...

It's a shame I lost my full Doom benchmark, I did a combo test testing cache L1/L2 on and off, and how much pc speaker, adlib, wavetable, sound blaster would inpact in framerate...

The Q2 score sounds about right, a little bit on the low side. I can't find many comparisons, it seems that 38fps would be appropriate for a 200MHz MMX, but the settings and driver might be different. According to http://www.hwupgrade.it/articoli/skvideo/4/vo … oo-2_index.html you should see 44-45 fps.
I don't know if Doom would be too helpful.
Here is a comparison for FSB100: http://www.anandtech.com/show/200/4

MMX 233 + voodoo 1 => Quake 2 640x480
hwupgrade.it : 30,2fps
anandtech.com : 19,9fps
Also I found this voodoo 2 benchmark over a vogon thread http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a66/Amakusa6 … gaming_comp.gif

Well, I'll teste the 250MHz pentium MMX250 soon and compare the results with the 233