Well, this is pretty awesome. Per my usual pattern of -> purchase oddball hardware -> fight with it and unrelated issues for hours -> attain results, I managed to acquire a brand new M3D a month back. Got around to testing it with my Voodoo 5500 and an A7V333 with an Athlon 3000+ being clocked at roughly 1 GHz, factoring in the double-stepping, 500 MHz clock speed, and 100 MHz FSB. Tomb Raider hates running in Windows but pure DOS is just fine. Single buffer mode at 400 x 300 can hit the 60 FPS target pretty easily, minus a few of the more intense scenes. It seems like that as the card hits certain frame rates it starts to cap itself. Sometimes it shoots for 30, sometimes 60, but if I set the resolution as low as possible and leave it single buffered it'll climb to 90+, pixelated rather comically. I guess given the DOS Compatibility Matrix this is to be expected. Does anyone have a recommendation for a CPU/GPU combo that does a better job around the 800 x 600 range? I know a huge chunk of the performance on these cards has to do with the host GPU, PCI transfer rates, and whatnot. Barring any other recommendations, I may move this to a Super Socket 7 build for better native DOS sound card support, or maybe a Pentium III or III-S. I really just want to play the games supporting the hardware natively with that 60 FPS target. The ones I care about most are probably Mechwarrior 2, Resident Evil, Virtual On, Tomb Raider, ReLoaded, and Unreal. I'm sure I'll encounter plenty of headaches along the way.
I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.