K6-2+ 550 won't be enough for stable 60+ fps experience in 800x600. It will be more or less playable though.

even if 640x480 is decent i would use that res.

but the video cards... are they going to impact the FPS at all? or is it all just in the CPU with these VESA modes? cheers

but the video cards... are they going to impact the FPS at all?

You need significantly higher resolution and/or better CPU to see the difference.

for comparison, my k6-233 with matrox millennium generally does 15-25fps in 640x480, and easily drops to single digits in places with lots of transparencies. it really was a more ambitious (and buggy, when looking at the busted HUD code...) game than duke3d and certainly didn't run all that well on period hardware.

at least the k6-2+ has MTRRs available which might help a little bit but as said, you're looking more at 640x480 than 800x600 when aiming for 60fps. personally i think that high resolutions in build are overrated and 640x480 is the sweet spot on a CRT, as the textures simply aren't exactly high res. high resolutions come more into use when trying to fill an LCD without scaling, but by that point, a source port with widescreen support would be a good alternative.

though to be honest back in the day anything around 30fps was probably considered "smooth" already ^^

yes but there is quite the difference between 20fps and 30fps, and you have to consider the k6-233 was pretty top of the line when this game came out. also 640x480 really was the expected standard by that time so i don't think people would have liked to switch back to VGA for better performance on a new machine. so i think it's fair to call it a pretty badly performing game. i believe the room-over-room stuff they did doesn't help performance either as duke3d runs consistently faster on the same machine.

i tested it on my p3 voodoo and it still ran pretty bad. especially when you got close to a sprite eg the gravestones in the first level. i think i might look into the unofficial glide patch thingo.

make sure to run fastvid or run it in windows with video drivers installed. and yes voxel objects will tank performance hard when going up close. i think the 3dfx patches do nothing useful other than blur everything with filtering.

Avoid any 3dfx patches for Build engine games. The Build engine is not 3D and hence can not make use of 3D acceleration. What these patches do is basically rendering the 2D scene to a large plain in order to apply filtering. The result is ugly and performance even worse.

I remember playing Blood and most other Build engine games in higher resolutions back then without much trouble. Can't recall what system I had at that time, but pretty sure it was a Pentium II 400 MHz. Your CPU is most likely not an issue here.

Do you have UNIVBE or any other VBE extension loaded for your graphics card? This is crucial for performance, as the VESA routines implemented in the VGA BIOS especially of later cards isn't good most of the time. Also, run these games from DOS with no EMM386 loaded. It will make a huge difference for speed, too. Noticed that with Redneck Rampage (last Build game afaik), that was just sluggish to play otherwise.

actually these games probably leave some performance on the table when running on 6th gen processors... according to ken silverman's page, the build engine renderer is pentium optimized, and some time in 1997 he got a pentium ii and optimized a few drawing routines for that, but i've heard that duke3d, build and shadow warrior all use the same version of the build engine, which obviously far predates that. if a source port is based on the later iteration it might actually perform faster, if it doesn't add any code bloat on its own.

about running in DOS, i tested shadow warrior a while ago on a p133 system under win95 osr2 vs. booting to DOS via f8, it was about 1-2fps faster in DOS in a ~15fps scene at 640x480. but conversely loading times are faster under windows due to its 32-bit disk access and of course VCACHE removes the trouble of thinking about smartdrive, which seems like an absolute must for build games when not running off some flash storage.

How about the mac versions?

Mac version of Blood? Probably works horrible. It's somewhat problematic to run Build games even now (see Ion FuryMaiden), after years of source code tinkering.

QEMU 3Dfx can run Blood 3Dfx 800x600 at 80+FPS on any cheap Intel laptops from the past 5 years. Even if you dislike 3Dfx mode, the VESA software rendering has no problem at 60FPS in with accelerated QEMU even at 1024x768.

i'll be putting the k6-2+ in the machine tonight and i'm going to try the s3 virge cos its a decent dos performer and see how resolutions go.

@derSammler univbe/vbe extensions - i'm unsure, i assume no. I'll look into it. cheers

The Build engine chokes at high resolutions for whatever reason. I needed a 3GHz P4 just to get 30 FPS at 1280x1024 (and still sub-20 at 1600x1200.) 800x600 should be OK on a K6-2+, but don't expect "locked" 60 FPS.

There are some tweaks out there to enable write combining in pure DOS that will probably give you some improvements too.

thanks @xjas i'll take a peep at that when i'm home.

I needed a 3GHz P4 just to get 30 FPS at 1280x1024 (and still sub-20 at 1600x1200.)

There's something wrong with your setup. I can get Blood playable at 1600x1200 on overclocked Athlon XP + KT333. Although not 60fps stable.

^^ are you running under pure DOS or Win9x? I think there are further chipset optimizations available under Windows that make a big difference in Build. (Also, I was testing Duke3D but AFAIK Blood should be similar.)

^^ are you running under pure DOS or Win9x?

DOS mode from Windows 98 SE.

Also, I was testing Duke3D but AFAIK Blood should be similar.

Blood is noticeably heavier than Duke3D.