God Of Gaming wrote:

I own an Asrock Conroe865PE with Pentium E5800, hopefully that will be enough to run Painkiller well on the cpu side of things, but how about graphics, what kind of win98-compatible gpu will get good fps at a high res (like 1600x1200), I bet the usually recommended FX 5900 will struggle... would ati x850xt cut it?

Also didnt know the wavetracing is done in software, so what does the processor on the card handle then, just the HRTF?

You would be optimizing for one game. Literally ever other A3D game will run great on a 1ghz pentium 3 and a geforce 4.

1ghz pentium 3 will be holding back a GF4 Ti, unless you meant a GF4 MX. Also GF4 Ti itself, cant quite handle forcing AA and AF at the same time, at 1600x1200. A fast P4 or Athlon XP with FX 5900 (Ultra) is a much better pick imo, it can do 1600x1200, it can force AA and AF, and dx9 compatibility allows using nglide, and cpu is not holding gpu back. And game compatibility of FX 5900 with 45.23 driver shouldnt be any worse than GF4 game compatibility. Performance wise it should be able to max out any A3D game, maybe just slightly struggling with the latest ones such as the few Quake 3 engine games, or Giants Citizen Kabuto, but lowering the AA in those should help. But if something as late as Painkiller enters the list, everything changes, E5800 + X850XT might be more suitable. Compatibility with few games will be lost because of lack of table fog tho... Doesnt quite seem possible to make a perfect win98 pc where everything will work at its best, does it 😀 Perhaps 2 win98 PCs will be needed, E5800 + X850XT to be the main, and another secondary to handle the more problematic games

For overkill Win 98 GPU there are really just 3 options. Officially, you can go for any version of X850 or 6800, which already would be much faster then FX5900. Or, if you're a bit adventurous, you can try unofficial drivers for 7800 or 7900, read some discussion about it here: Geforce 7900 GS AGP Windows 98

I remember playing Painkiller on its release on an Athlon XP 1800+, 256MB ram and GF 4ti 4200 64mb with 4xAA and it seemed to run great, but I may have had lower standards back then.

Literally ever other A3D game will run great on a 1ghz pentium 3 and a geforce 4.

True. This very same pc of mine runs HL pretty well with A3D and software Truform (which is very cpu costly btw). The case with Painkiller I feel is that the game doesn't seem to be too well optimized for A3D. Already in the demo flythrough you can notice, when going through all the explosions, individual pieces of debris landing behind you. The bigger these physics interactions get the bigger is the slowdown with A3D, whereas if thoughtfully done, the system would cull some of those smaller noises during the larger scale events as the brain does in real life when experiencing a sensory overload. In the single player, already in the first semetery level, the slowdown is proportional to the number of enemies on screen, even when they are all facing you head on and are of the same type. It seems as if they are all being treated as individual sound sources and cause the A3D workload to scale linearly on the cpu.

According to the benchmarks I have seen, you actually get worse FPS in windows 98 with FX 5900 and later despite the graphics cards being more capable. This probably has something to do with poorly optimized drivers and increased driver overhead. The geforce 4 cards perform the best overall, with the FX cards and the geforce 3 cards performing more or less the same - except at higher resolutions and with AA, where newer cards pull away a little bit, but often still at under 60 fps.

mothergoose729 wrote:

According to the benchmarks I have seen, you actually get worse FPS in windows 98 with FX 5900 and later despite the graphics cards being more capable. This probably has something to do with poorly optimized drivers and increased driver overhead. The geforce 4 cards perform the best overall, with the FX cards and the geforce 3 cards performing more or less the same - except at higher resolutions and with AA, where newer cards pull away a little bit, but often still at under 60 fps.

Was it with a wimpy CPU/platform?
I'd be interested to see the benchmarks if you have a link.
I currently have a theory (and just a theory at this stage) that the wider a GPU is, the more it can be constrained by a system which is relatively weak.

according to some old review, FX 5900 Ultra in UT 2003 scales pretty linearly with cpu speed, they only tested it up to P4 3.2 it seems but it looks like it would keep scaling with faster cpus

now UT 2003 is not exactly a win98 game, but still, people using FX 5900s with a P3 are definitely holding it back big time, no matter the game

Looks best to have the fastest processor available, so if your FPS suffers, blame it on the GPU and not the CPU... depending on the game of course.

Here's a sample of Painkiller running with A3D, use headphones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FL295d9JIM

HRTF effect appears to be there and working well, but Im not noticing any wavetracing reverb?

Grzyb wrote:

Warlord wrote:

Overkill is any dual core or higher CPU even if its old like Pentium D which no one in their right mind should even use.

Seconded.
DOS and DOS-based Windows are inherently uniprocessor, using them on anything multicore/hyperthreaded is a mistake.

Isn't a single core of a C2D faster than a P4 though? I haven't run any comparisons myself yet, but I remember seeing more than one post saying that 1 core on C2D E5xxx or E8xxx would outrun even the highest clocked P4.

God Of Gaming wrote:

HRTF effect appears to be there and working well, but Im not noticing any wavetracing reverb?

Maybe it's not implemented.

dr.ido wrote:

Grzyb wrote:

Warlord wrote:

Overkill is any dual core or higher CPU even if its old like Pentium D which no one in their right mind should even use.

Seconded.
DOS and DOS-based Windows are inherently uniprocessor, using them on anything multicore/hyperthreaded is a mistake.

Isn't a single core of a C2D faster than a P4 though? I haven't run any comparisons myself yet, but I remember seeing more than one post saying that 1 core on C2D E5xxx or E8xxx would outrun even the highest clocked P4.

@Grzyb Just switch off cores if you are that hell bend on single core... what's so hard about it ?
Core i7 980X + Win98 : LINK

Only going from memory I know when C2D first came out it was slower than the P4 for single core processing. I know I didn't upgrade until subsequent releases of the C2D when they got the frequency up.

Pentium Ds are slower (usually in single thread work), than Pentium 4s.
Core 2 Duos are always better (regardless if single/multi threaded workload.

That's not what all the reviews said when C2D first came out. They were slower than the faster P4s.

Core 2 Duo E6300 with 1,86GHz was usually faster than Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (3,73GHz).
Why a 3,8GHz Pentium 4 (fastest ever released), should be faster than it ?

Are you sure you aren't confusing Core 2 Duo with Pentium D ?
Pentium 4s were pretty much dropped from reviews by the time Core 2 launched (July 2006).

I fairly confident that even a conservatively overclocked Pentium M Dothan on a later AOPEN motherboard with fast FSB and ram runs circles around Cedarmills in single threaded. I saw the benchmarks.

Cedar Mill can achieve 5Ghz though.