Of course the FPS will slow down in intense scenes. That happened since the dawn of computing. Even today, an intense scene with lots of effects and geometry can slow a card down. It's normal.

Try to enable VSync, or if it really gets an issue, cap the FPS to 30 or 35 if you are that annoyed by it.

Personally I don't see screen tearing and stuttering as much, but some do.

Here's an old half-life tweak guide made for voodoo 2's in mind, it might help.
http://www.play-half-life.de/Main1.html

How fast is your Pentium III? The Voodoo3 should be plenty fast to hit above 60fps most of the time, but Half-Life can be remarkably heavy on the CPU. Pentium III 500 won't cut it for example and will often go into the 30s like in your case.

Sonofa...I took the wrong case! It's the PII that I was running, bastards used the same case for both Pentiums. Now I need to find where the P3 is lurking.... Thanks for asking, I never thought of checking the CPU as I was sure this was the correct one as it had V3 installed and the V2 was supposed to be in the PII which it cleary wasn't. 😵

🤣! Glad I could help I guess!

I've played a fair amount of HL on my PII400 with a voodoo 4 4500 in glide and it does struggle a bit, CPU is definitely a limiting factor, even with a P3 you are likely to see FPS drops related to the CPU,

tgod wrote:

Here's an old half-life tweak guide made for voodoo 2's in mind, it might help.
http://www.play-half-life.de/Main1.html

Excuse me to "steal" that thread, I just have a small question :
I've got an SLI of voodoo 2 on a pentium 2 400 (overclocked to 448MHz) and I tried these commands on half life but it didn't seem to change anything. In fact I don't know if those commands actually worked since when I type them, the game says "player : gl_texsort(0)" and does'nt say anything else" How do I use these commands ?

Please note that I'm using the 1.0 version (yep, retail version !)

You have the console enabled right? Simply typing gl_texsort in there will tell if if the command is valid since half life will reply with something like "gl_textsort is 1"
It also looked liked you typed the parenthesis, don't need those. Just "gl_texsort 1" to change the value. Not all the commands in that guide work depending on the version of the game you use, so just move to the next one then.

okay, the tutorial wasn't really clear on the syntax, like I said, I litteraly typed "gl_texsort1(0)"

Allright, so these settings were already set to the best options for voodoo 2s ...
Anyways that computer isn't finished, once I'll find the right motherboard, I will be able to overclock that CPU to 533 (at least, if it wants to co-operate ...). Sure I could use a pentium 3 made for that speed, but this is a special build ^^

Thank you very munch !

sf78 wrote:

Sonofa...I took the wrong case! It's the PII that I was running, bastards used the same case for both Pentiums. Now I need to find where the P3 is lurking.... Thanks for asking, I never thought of checking the CPU as I was sure this was the correct one as it had V3 installed and the V2 was supposed to be in the PII which it cleary wasn't. 😵

This is why I've been badging all of my systems up. Check it out:

(unable to validate after Pentium III CPU upgrade)

FFXIhealer wrote:

This is why I've been badging all of my systems up.

Yes, but the IBM already did it. Too bad they put the stickers in the lower right corner and I didn't bother to look that closely. I usually just use a piece of masking tape on top of the case for specs as I tend to swap out parts quite often. I did find my P3 tower, but it had XP installed so I didn't bother with it. Still, interesting to see it's such a demanding game.

These old 3D games are often a lot more demanding than imagined / memory tricks us 😀

With Half-Life I think it's mostly the CPU that needs beefing up a bit.

If you have a Slot 1 machine, that's easy, so many options. With Super Socket 7 not so much. There is only so much even a K6-III can do.

There's Phil. Hey Phil, I got MS-DOS 7 working in Upper Memory (Windows 95 system). I've been watching some of your videos on YouTube. Good stuff there.

FFXIhealer wrote:

There's Phil. Hey Phil, I got MS-DOS 7 working in Upper Memory (Windows 95 system). I've been watching some of your videos on YouTube. Good stuff there.

Nice 😊

With the V3 don't use the 3dfx Mini Driver that HL provides. 3dfx has a more mature ICD installed for the V3 and will work with the "default" setting.

Same advice applies to Quake2 and licensees. Don't use "3dfx OpenGL" for Voodoo3!

I think I tried that already, the WickedGL patch did seem to make a difference though. The reason I remember H-L running pretty well was that V2 only used 800x600 resolution so that probably helped too, even though in theory PII should be slightly faster than the K6-2 we had back then. Anyway, thanks for the input, I'm already at later stages of the game so it's all good.

🤣 Back on my Pentium II system, I ran ALL my games at 800 x 600 unless I was forced down to 640 x 480 (Final Fantasy 7/8, NES/SNES ROMs, etc).

FFXIhealer wrote:

This is why I've been badging all of my systems up. Check it out: […]
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sf78 wrote:

Sonofa...I took the wrong case! It's the PII that I was running, bastards used the same case for both Pentiums. Now I need to find where the P3 is lurking.... Thanks for asking, I never thought of checking the CPU as I was sure this was the correct one as it had V3 installed and the V2 was supposed to be in the PII which it cleary wasn't. 😵

This is why I've been badging all of my systems up. Check it out:

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(unable to validate after Pentium III CPU upgrade)

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where can one find a Windows ME case badge, i can't find any