Deus Ex Win98 in D3D, low performance \ VOGONS

Deus Ex Win98 in D3D, low performance

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First post, by Der_Richter

Posted on 2018-12-01, 21:48

Der_Richter Offline

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Hi.

Decided I was going to revisit Deus Ex, so I built a machine containing a 1GHz Tualatin Pentium III and a greatly overpowered Radeon 9800XT (happened to be the AGP card I had closest). System works fine and it runs SiN and Quake 3 smooth as butter in OpenGL.

Deus Ex on the other hand. I tried my original disc as well as copying an install from GOG across, being the GOTY-edition. D3D patch applied, so I choose that mode n settings. But in game, I am treated to abysmal 20-25 frames per second. Which, considering the overpowered hardware is very odd. Back in the day I ran DX smooth as silk on a 900MHz AMD and a Voodoo2. Also remember it running equally smooth on my later GeForce3... Is there some peculiar stuff going on with Deus Ex, when using ATi drivers I’m not aware of or some general weirdness with the D3D mode I don’t recall?

Preserver, refurbisher, collector. In that order.

Reply 1 of 3, by eric1992

Posted on 2018-12-01, 23:29

eric1992 Offline

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Deus Ex uses the Unreal Engine that was used in Unreal and Unreal Tournament. To be frank I have no idea why Unreal Engine games don't work very well with Direct3D/DirectX.

Reply 2 of 3, by leileilol

Posted on 2018-12-01, 23:44

leileilol Offline

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It's more of the game being a CPU hog in this case. 20fps is normal for a CPU like that. This was a noted problem in its day. No amount of GPU overpower will stop the Deus Ex CPU bottleneck. Ambitious, big maps with all that AI (including animals) through an OOP system with all floats can do that

Also don't apply the "D3D Patch". That's a patch intended for the initial release (1002).

eric1992 wrote:

To be frank I have no idea why Unreal Engine games don't work very well with Direct3D/DirectX.

The Direct3D renderer that was made by Epic does a couple of extra 'slow' things:
- Precaching textures
- More detail texture layers

Last edited by leileilol on 2018-12-03, 01:03. Edited 1 time in total.

long live PCem

Reply 3 of 3, by Der_Richter

Posted on 2018-12-02, 01:41

Der_Richter Offline

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Hmm. Maybe in the Deus Ex case it is normal after all, and I just forgot that part. That is highly possible actually. However, upon further testing I also noticed some serious frame rate drops in SiN as well, going from 100 to 32 in places and then tried Re-Volt to check some other DX title and there I also saw some nasty drops to the lower 40s in some places. I would have expected these games to be easily steamrolled by the GPU in question. And in those games CPU load is low as far as I can measure it... So I feel like something is going on here... All drivers are up to date and I am using DX9c for 98SE. SiN in particular, being based on Q2, should just breeze along I would have thought, but sill suffers from low frame rates. AGP is indicated as 4x which is max for the board. However, for some reason, I don’t think Windows is picking up on the VIA 4-in-1 drivers I installed, because when checking devices it still indicates it’s using some Microsoft 1999 driver for the controllers on the mb. Tried to reinstall those but it doesn’t get picked up and if I try to point out an inf file manually it says the hardware (like PCI bridge) is not supported. Could this perhaps the issues? Never had a VIA board in 98SE before so I don’t know how much of an impact that is...

Preserver, refurbisher, collector. In that order.

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