Don't you need FASTVID or similar to "unlock" the full potential of a VGA on a pentium2 and upwards? Have you ran it before you made your benchmarks?

^^ Wasn't aware of it. I'll go through and try it later (probably only on the P4 stuff). I wanted to start off with a bone-stock configuration anyone could try to reproduce.

Yes, Fastvid or equivalent is essential. Here's a thread where I learn about its equivalent for Athlon XP CPUs.

Fastvid + P3 & BX > Athlon XP & KT133A&

Do try FastVid - I'm really curious for an accurate comparison to S939. With MTRRLFBE (Athlon 64 4000+) I get 40 FPS in Quake Timedemo1 @ 1280x1024. Unfortunately MTRRLFBE does not solve the abysmally poor performance of build engine games. NOFLB seems to smooth things out but the ingame FPS counter still claims 10 FPS. There's no way it's accurate because it is much smoother once NOLFB is running -- the problem then becomes terrible tearing.

Still questing how to get build games to take advantage of the Athlon 64's power.

^^ Results with Fastvid updated.

infiniteclouds wrote:

I'm really curious for an accurate comparison to S939. With MTRRLFBE (Athlon 64 4000+) I get 40 FPS in Quake Timedemo1 @ 1280x1024. Unfortunately MTRRLFBE does not solve the abysmally poor performance of build engine games.

I got 48 FPS in Quake on the Radeon so that seems pretty close to the mark (discounting the Voodoo Banshee result which seems unusually low.) Saw 44/48 in Hexen 2 on the two cards.

Fastvid didn't seem to make much difference in Duke3D, maybe 3-5 FPS at best, so the bottleneck seemingly lies elsewhere.

I'm also curious to see what happens on fast AMDs (754/939/+) with the other games so please post up if anyone gives it a try!

Another thing to keep in mind is that VIA chipsets are quite slow in DOS.

I have two P3 machines:

440BX
Celeron 1.4GHz, 100FSB, 256K L2'
512MB PC100 CL2
Voodoo3 AGP

Via Apollo Pro266T
PIII-S 1.58GHz, 150FSB, 512K L2
2GB DDR-300, CL2
6800GT AGP

There are some DOS tests where the BX/Celery/SDRAM system actually manages to outperform the VIA/PIII/DDR system. Yet, in Windows, the VIA system absolutely demolishes the BX system.

I stay away from doing dos gaming on pentium 4 and newer systems though as you clearly proven that for some games it makes a big difference but personally I stay away from modern systems for this use for the usual reasons plus I like period correct systems.

If all else just shot gun it and have multiple systems so that one isn't forced to make it work with just one or two systems.

xjas wrote:

I'm also curious to see what happens on fast AMDs (754/939/+) with the other games so please post up if anyone gives it a try!

I don't have Hexen or Descent 2 on hand... but build engine games (Blood and Duke3D) run poorly. 800x600 is between 30-40FP on the rooftop... and more like 40-50FPS on the streets.. running NOLFB improves performance and FPS seems locked at 48 -- never dips. This is only at 800x600 though... so there is something that hasn't been figured out yet about getting Athlon 64s to run well with Build.

Also, can someone tell me how to remove NOLFB from memory? It's nice to get that boost in performance for this game but it is annoying having to restart to get rid of it -- it puts severe limitations on Quake's available resolutions when it's in memory.

xjas,
Great job and big thanks for taking the time to run these benchmarks.

I happily stand corrected on my previous assumptions that DOS games cannot max out a fast P4. I would say, based on your results, that 800x600 is roughly the cutoff resolution. On 800x600, a fast P-III should be enough for all games (assuming FASTVID is applied). Beyond that - a P4 starts being useful.