I don't recall testing them all exhaustively, but I can provide a few data points.

I recall playing Duke 3D on a Cyrix MediaGX/200, and it was really rather, err, glacial. Playable, but only just, at 640x480. The next two machines I tried it on - a K6-2/350 and a Pentium 2/450 - were glassy smooth. If I had to take a random whack at a point somewhere in there, it'd probably be at about the Pentium 166/MMX or PPro 180 level, with a good video card, more with a mediocre one. It plays OK at 320x240 on a 5x86/133, so I'm extrapolating from there: on integer code (which Duke's engine is), the 5x86/133 is about on par with a P75, give or take. Double the clock speed, thus almost quadrupling the speed, gives a 150MHz Pentium, but adding a bit more to account for overhead, and you arrive around 166/200. It doesn't use MMX, but since those chips are a bit more skookum, it couldn't hurt.

As for other games of that era, I'm afraid to admit that's the era I missed - I largely went from the VGA era straight on to the Win2k era, seeing as that was the time during which - just as I acquired a machine able to play them - I went off to boot camp and was mostly out of the loop for quite a while.

I'd go socket 7 or late socket 5. 166mhz pentium or better, 16mb of ram or better. Maybe an TNT or voodoo3.

A Pentium II 450 with MTRR enabled does 60 FPS at the starting point in Duke3D. Not sure about the other games, but Duke3D has a FPS counter, so I use it quite often in my projects.

High resolution DOS gaming can be quite demanding and you can see noticeable differences between graphics cards.

I'd go for a Pentium III therefore, try out a few speeds, the chips are cheap and easy to find.

Certainly, if I were looking to build a box that'll handle all the various high-end DOS games, I'd be looking at more than SS7, though for the ones you listed I think a decent S7 rig will do and SS7 will do very well.

But if I wanted to make very sure indeed - maybe an original Athlon, probably with an Irongate chipset, making sure to still have an ISA slot for an ESS Audiodrive + Dreamblaster X2, combined with a Quadro2 Pro graphics card, and 512MB of RAM. No game will use that, but if you've got the Athlon, might as well!

Likely a couple of options to look at:
Suitable 440bx with a Coppermine/Tualatin and compatible slocket
ISA slot equipped socket A system with compatible Thunderbird of Palomino CPU (KT133 chipset likely the most appropriate)

Further options might work using a PCI sound card, but I'll defer to other's expertise on PCI audio compatibility in DOS.

A Pentium III or Athlon/Tbird will be adequate enough for smoothly 640x480 all the build game releases.

Use a ISA sound card if you can. They do certain sound processing effects that'll crash a PCI sound card

Yep I use a PIII 1Ghz with a Voodoo 3 for SVGA DOS games. My P166MMX doesn't quite cut it - totally playable, but not super smooth either.

Wow. And I was thinking that a Klamath already was overkill..
Just out of couriosity, what's needed to play Toonstruck with FMVs smoothly ?

Jo22 wrote:

Just out of couriosity, what's needed to play Toonstruck with FMVs smoothly ?

I guess you could do that even on a fast 486, let's say Pentium 75/90 to make sure. It's a 2D adventure game, not much of a stress for the CPU 😀. Try some 3D SVGA games though and poor old Pentium will have a very hard time.

I agree with the rest, if you are trying to play 3D DOS games at 640x480, your best bet is a high clocked Pentium III (>733MHz) with a 440BX or i815 (or even Apollo Pro 133, why not 😉 ) and an ISA soundcard. Of course, this is for very smooth gameplay, on such a system Duke3D and Quake will probably run ~60fps, where as Blood will probably will have a few chugs here and there. If you are perfectly okay with lesser performance (say ~25-30fps) you can totally make do with a Pentium II 266-300 or maybe even an MMX 233 on some cases.

It depends also on the gfx-card! Newer AGP Cards are SLOW!!! in Dos-Vesa modes.
I think a PII and an good PCI-Card will make a really good Dos-Hires-Gaming machine.

I finally decided to use a P3 1.4 GHz Tualatin, MSI 694T Pro board, and Voodoo3 video card.

The only problem is that I only have 1 ISA slot (for the SB16), and I want to use general midi. I tried to use the SB16 midi interface (MPU-401) with a SC-55, but Duke3D stutters and lags from time to time (anybody knows why?). I tried enabling softMPU but it's the same. I finally ended up plugging a YMF724F only to use it's MPU-401. And now everything is running fine. I tried Duke3D and MBF Doom, both run very smoothly in high res.

Thank you very much for all your suggestions and comments, they are very informative and interesting to read.

Duke3d generally caches stuff ingame while coming across them for the first time and this can be bad without smartdrv loaded while playing it in pure DOS.

Some SB16s have issues, though I can never keep straight which ones have trouble and which don't. Kinda why I like ESS cards, actually.