Upload no. 7 is available since past weekend.
The main new thing are the protected mode variants of VESA functions bank-switching and page-flipping. The speed improvement is not impressive though, 1% at most. In past uploads the hires wait for retrace option may have been reversed, taking a toll on FPS while one thinks it was off. It is now working as it should be.
Below some Shareware Timedemo 3 scores.
MBF 2.04 On a Pentium MMX 200MHz :
(Voodoo 3 AGP or S3 Virge PCI+S3VBE20, ALi 5 mainboard at 66MHz FSB)
640x400, no border, PageFlipped = 35,9 FPS
320x200, 'stdvid' = 110,6 FPS
Duke 3D seems to do around 40 to 60 FPS in 640x400 (hard to decide on an average)
MBF 2.04 On a VIA C3 Nehemiah, running at half speed 9.0x66 = 600MHz:
(Voodoo 3 AGP or Geforce 2MX AGP, i440BX mainboard, Write-combining for LFB)
640x400, no border = 71,7 FPS
640x400, no border, PageFlipped = 71,6 FPS
640x400, no border, PageFlipped, WaitRetrace = 54,0 FPS (normally timedemo disables Waitretrace)
640x400, no border, 'nolfb' = 44,6 FPS
Duke 3D seems to do around 60 to 65 FPS in 640x400 (hard to decide on an average)
Quake needs the system to be at 9.0x133=1200MHz to get similar frame rates in 640x480.
I don't get these Duke 3D framerates on the Pentium MMX. They should be around 30..35. And if Duke 3D is so slick then why does it fall behind in the VIA C3 benchmarks?
Some things I worked on, but which failed to make it in the upload:
- Tried compiler optimize options for 586 and Pentium: gave just a half percent increase in frame rate.
- Tried to convert and import the original Adlib OPL timbres: That part succeeded, but the allegro adlib.c driver does not work well with it; it sounds worse then the default timbres. To be continued?