hi
While I can play with a nice framerate games like ICR2 or GP2 in svga, they become unplayable as soon as I enable textures (even very partially, like, just road textures).
i wonder what could cause this, as it seems to me that the heavy thing is displaying polygons (?).
thanks
Thanks, been a long time since I updated this thread:
Game Acronyms List
Short answer: buy a faster machine.
Long(er) answer: polygons are (more or less) just instructions like "draw a line from a to b to c to d, and fill the form with some colour (or shades of coulours)". When textures are involved, the area "inside" the form that's outlined by the polygon has to be calculated pixel by pixel. Perspective correction and probably a lot of other stuff has to be applied to that piece of graphics, before you see it on the screen. This is _very_ CPU intensive. I remember having a very fast machine at the time the first _really_ demanding DOS 3D games were released, and none of the games at that time would run with acceptable framerates on my machine. I especially remember Hi-Octane, which was a slideshow with all graphical features enabled. Doom and a lot of other FPS games were using coding tricks to achieve their performance (i'm no coder, but i believe that, for example, Doom does not display a "real" 3D world, like Quake does). Obviously, the CPU's at that time were too slow for "real" 3D, and that was the time when 3D accelerators were released to compensate for that.
wrote:Short answer: buy a faster machine.
On the other hand, Quake runs just fine in DOSBox. Perhaps the OP should just tune his DOSBox (dynamic core, frame skip, cycles, etc.).
JAL
Thanks for your help, I didn't know textures required such power.
I mean I thought that, as dosbox emulates video cards (say, S3), the fact that this emulated videocard has textures to display or not shouldn't impact performance...
Latest dosbox cvs on windows xp sp3
dosbox does not emulate accellerated features of early 3d hardware
That's not the point. The games the OP has mentioned do not support any kind of 3D acceleration at all, AFAIK. This means that the CPU has to do all the maths for displaying 3D objects, textures, etc. . These games were pretty much unplayable on machines that existed at the time the games were released (in SVGA and full details). Think of these games as the "Crysis" of the time (; .
