1nsane is another example of demanding glide games.

Operation Flashpoint is the most demanding Glide game IMO.

leileilol wrote:

Operation Flashpoint is the most demanding Glide game IMO.

Well, this game can kill any video-card with LOD Bias, Objects LOD and Shadows LOD settings. 😀

P.S. I was wrong about 1nsane, it works ok even with maximum graphical options.

I just finished Deus Ex about a week ago, running it on a 1000 Mhz P3 with 512MB RAM and a Voodoo5.

I didn't do any real benchmarking but it ran consistently well at 1024*768 with all effects maxed out. The only times when I had some serious framerate issues, although I do mean serious ones, were with moments that had a lot of steam onscreen or with enemies that used flamethrowers. Flamethrowers sunk the framerate so bad (single digits) that I vowed never to pick one up myself, and to pick off those bad guys from a distance.

EDIT: I'm running third party drivers. Some german ones as I recall. Falcon something-or-another..

Dont forget there are a few mods to pretty the game up if your running it on modern hardware

updated exe and launcher
http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/index.htm

like a dx10 renderer
http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv/

opengl and dx9 renderers
http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/

High Definition Texture Package
http://www.moddb.com/mods/project-hdtp

new vision
http://www.moddb.com/mods/new-vision

I was curious how low the framerate really was so I made a quick and dirty video. I was really surprised. I know there were a few framerate dips while I was playing but I didn't expect it to go below 20 regularly. Shouldn't it be running faster than this? I know the Aureal eats a bit of CPU, but not that much surely?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCF72KKGL_A
The noise at the start goes away after a few seconds once the camera picks up the soundcard output.

I also checked the Voodoo 5 driver and apparently I'm using Amigamerlin 2.5 for Voodoo 3/4/5 (2002-21-11)

Run it with sound disabled and see if speed changes much. Though we have already talked about how Deus Ex ran poorly on contemporary hardware.

Effects like steam and flamethrowers are typically using layered alpha textures which consumes a lot of fillrate. It's called overdraw. It drags down performance in any game on any of the hardware from those days unless you run quite a low resolution. You want something like a GeForce4 Ti or FX with a lot more fillrate in addition to improved memory efficiency and overdraw management hardware to clear up that sort of problem.

Swaaye: Yeah I tried sans sound, but there wasn't much of an improvement.

I have a GF3 Ti500 that might marginally improve things, but it just doesn't feel right to run the Unreal engine on anything but a Voodoo card. Since I already cleared the game and didn't notice the framerate much when I couldn't see the numbers, it's not really a big deal either, but I'm scared to find out how Operation Flashpoint will behave when I get to that one. Hopefully a better optimized game.

Thirst wrote:

I have a GF3 Ti500 that might marginally improve things, but it just doesn't feel right to run the Unreal engine on anything but a Voodoo card. Since I already cleared the game and didn't notice the framerate much when I couldn't see the numbers, it's not really a big deal either, but I'm scared to find out how Operation Flashpoint will behave when I get to that one. Hopefully a better optimized game.

GeForce 3 is excellent and in some situations is a giant step ahead of GeForce 2 Ultra and certainly Voodoo5. It's only a 2001 chip so not exactly a big step forward in time either. And since it's DirectX 8 you can use the UTGLR renderer for Deus Ex/Unreal/UT99/Rune, though on Windows 98 you probably need to use an older version of it.

True enough. If I don't get a decent framerate in Rune I'll definitely pop in the GF3. Unlike Deus Ex you really need the gameplay to be smooth to do well in Rune.

swaaye wrote:

Effects like steam and flamethrowers are typically using layered alpha textures which consumes a lot of fillrate.

Deus Ex didn't do any alpha blending beyond 1-bit or alphatesting; those effects are all additive blended (which is far less expensive).

leileilol wrote:

Deus Ex didn't do any alpha blending beyond 1-bit or alphatesting; those effects are all additive blended (which is far less expensive).

It can still slow those 1999/2000 cards way down if it covers a significant amount of the view. Especially if also using 32bit rendering.

I would think the 'fire' (procedural fractal texture system) would be more taxing with the CPU processing+texture upload per frame than the blending of a few fire sprites and some streaming particles. Deus Ex used fire on A LOT of things more than the typical UnrealEngine title, including on said smoke and flames (and a bunch of common items use fire on their textures)

Could be.

http://youtu.be/cBA8No2uDPs?t=15s

swaaye wrote:

Could be.

http://youtu.be/cBA8No2uDPs?t=15s

Would be interesting to know what rig that was played on. Flamethrower looks silky smooth. It's a shame they don't really give you enough ammo to justify carrying it around throughout the game.

Probably your usual multicore post-GF8 setup.

Also that guy was playing Shifter (some popular crufty 'essential patch'). The flamethrower nor the sword are obtainable at this point

Deus Ex is pretty demanding indeed, although when I tried it on a Voodoo3 , the game was playable high detail/1024X768, and that was with a 700Mhz Pentium3 , the framerate usually stayed in the 30s . with some slowdown. Thankfully the game is fairly slow paces so it doesn't need a blazing fast frame rate to be enjoyable.

The best (released) card to play it on is of course the V5500, The card will give you 55-65fps even at 1280X1024 (thats from personal experience) , as long as you have enough CPU power to feed it (Im using an Athlon 1400 , but that P4 should be fairly equal to it).

That said, the Voodoo3 still gave me a better overall result than the Geforce2 Ti , where at the same resolution, the game was often around 10 frames lower (fair enough I did enable 32bit colour, but given that one expects the GF2TI to wipe the floor with the V3 , thats still a disappointing result)

I set up my ASUS A7V333 board with a GeForce3 to mess with and thought I'd try out Deus Ex to see how it runs.

test area near the beginning of Liberty Island:
1024x768x16-bit
Athlon 900 12-60fps
Athlon XP 1800+ 33-60fps
(60 fps when looking at a wall and is limited by vsync)

DXGLR 1.8 of the UTGLR project runs slightly faster and looks nicer than the old Direct3D renderer. Works on Windows 98SE. Going to 1600x1200x32-bit gives the same framerate range. GeForce3 still isn't the bottleneck.

I'll be setting up a new machine with a K6-III+ soon, hopefully at 600MHz (5x120 or 6x100) and a Voodoo 5, I'll be sure to try Deus Ex out! It should prove interesting!

F2bnp wrote:

I'll be setting up a new machine with a K6-III+ soon, hopefully at 600MHz (5x120 or 6x100) and a Voodoo 5, I'll be sure to try Deus Ex out! It should prove interesting!

I remember trying Deus Ex out with a K6-III 450Mhz, and a Voodoo3, it was pretty painful (fps usually around 10ish) , will be interesting to see what a Voodoo5500 does to it.