Try with 128 megs of ram

@BigDaddyM: he has a K6-3 CPU, which has on-die L2 cache. So even though 128 MB of RAM will make a difference, that difference shouldn't be that great.

I have the same board, but I use it with a GeForce 2 MX400 128bit card. With it I get the following:
GLQuake: 148 FPS
Quake 2: 84 FPS
3DMark2000: 3800 points

Now, regarding Quake 2, I don't think you can match the performance of a Pentium 2. It was a known fact at the time that Pentium 2s had much faster FPU and Quake 2 is an FPU loving game. Not only that, but it's clearly optimized for Pentium 2.
There is, however, a 3Dnow Patch for Quake 2, which will maybe add 5 - 10 FPS more.

My first recommendation: don't use VIA 4in1 drivers later than 4.35. Don't think your issue is related to this, but it's a general rule that I always follow, to get the best stability and speed.
My second recommendation: run the timedemos/benchmarks at multiple resolutions, so that you can see where the bottleneck is coming from. If you get the same FPS at 640x480 and 1024x768 it's clearly a CPU bottleneck.

Never compare 3DMark scores for different systems, only compare with similar systems to see if your results are aligned! The CPU score in 3DMark is probably greatly influenced by the 3DNow! instructions. Your setup is rather common on VOGONS, I'd compare results with other people running K6-III, K6-2+ and K6-3+ systems and Voodoo3 cards. I seem to remember Aladdin V running better with just 128MB RAM, off the top of my head can't remember if VIA MVP3 also had a similar thing going, I'd reduce to 256MB anyway though since you have two sticks in there. No dual channel on those old boards 😀. Also, don't use drivers from old CDs, they are usually outdated. For Voodoo3 you should just use the latest reference drivers and not any modded ones as they can introduce other variables into the mix. Best to keep it simple, that CPU will be holding the Voodoo3 back anyway. Also, for MVP3 it is probably best not to use 4in1 4.43. Someone had the courage to sit through benchmarks and find out the best of the bunch and it seems to be 4.26! (Re: VIA 4-in-1 driver experiences)

For Quake2, there was a 3DNow! patch that greatly improved performance. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case with many games. Expect a K6-III and Plus CPUs at 550MHz to be around the level of a Pentium 2 350 when it comes to games. Sometimes a little faster, closer to PII 400 territory and other times a little slower. It's just the nature of the beast. There are many threads around in VOGONS for K6 CPUs vs similarly clocked Pentiums, here's one you could look at to compare numbers: Pentium II/III VS K6-III+

Hope some of this helps!

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

For reference, I am running the K6 patch on Quake 2. Though I will go back and run multiple resolutions to see if I’m CPU bottlenecked or not.

I’ll also try an older version of the 4-in-1 and maybe 128MB (1x128MB) of RAM as I’m sure I’ll have a stick somewhere.

I’m already back on the latest official 3dfx drivers for the card, so I’m away from any modded drivers now anyway.

As I said 3DMark appears to be showing good CPU performance for my K6-III @500MHz so I think the system is fine barring the Voodoo 3 performance.

Actually lets scratch the “performance is fine” bit for the system as a whole.

Looking at the benchmarks in the PII/III vs K6-III thread, I’m seeing my CPU score is weak in comparison. Sure I’m 50MHz down, but I’m also around 3000 CPU marks in 3dmark99 behind, which is a 40% performance drop for a 10% clockrate drop.

Something more fundamental is amiss here I guess.

Is dma turned on for your hdd

Looking at an old spreadsheet where I kept track of FPS with different CPU/video/sound card combos, I see that I got 81.9 FPS with a K6-3+ 450MHz and Voodoo 3 3500 (and Aureal Vortex 2) at 1024x768 resolution.

Using a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI with the K6-3+ oc'd to 550MHz, I got 70.1 FPS.

I was using an FIC VA-503+ with Via MVP3.

Ok, to answer some questions, yes DMA is on for the HDD, set to AUTO in the BIOS and then enabled when installing the 4-in-1. Transfer rates seem consistent with UDMA speeds.

My SiSoft Sandra 2001 CPU/CPU Multimedia/Memory benchmarks all seem consistent with expected performance based on other benchmarks found online from back in the day or more recently on the likes of Vogons. For example my memory bandwidth seems comparable to the system in this thread My K6-3 + Voodoo3, but on the flip-side I'm still seeing a massive performance deficit compared to this system's 3dMark99 result.

What about Quake 2 timedemo in software mode (640 x 480)?
You should see ~ 24 FPS.

On one of my boards, I had a CPU related performance issue, and I only got 15 FPS in Quake 2 Software mode. If you are seeing above 22 FPS, I would say that you are good and the issue is related to the video card / AGP performance.
I actually have a Voodoo 3 3000 on one of my SS7 systems (not the DFI board, another one) but I think I'll actually try it on the DFI today and see what my results are. I know for a fact that Voodoo 3 does not work on my LuckyTech board (it's very unstable, because it's too power hungry), but not sure I tried it on the DFI before. Anyway, if you don't play glide games, the best option is to switch to a GeForce 2 MX card (128 bit versions only, the others are extremely slow and they will bottleneck even a very slow platform like SS7!). The GeForce 2 MX 400 128bit works like a charm on the DFI, it's stable, power consumption is very low (4 - 5 Watts) and performance is extremely good with driver version 7.76.

What I would try:
1. check that your RAM is running at 100 MHz (FSB speed), not AGP speed. There's a jumper for this (JP4).
2. Remove any peripherals that you might have, including the sound card, USB devices.
3. Access the BIOS, load the defaults, disable any unneeded devices, switch the RAM to CL2 - Turbo mode (PC133 modules can handle CL2 at 100MHz just fine and some of them can handle it even at 133MHz).
4. Just in case, use only 128 MB of RAM (although K6-3 should not see a big performance impact when having more memory) - either way, 256 MB or more is pretty useless on SS7. The platform can't properly handle anything that requires that much RAM.

I ran again all tests on the DFI P5BV3+ board without any overclock (normally I run the CPU at 600 MHz, but I reverted to 550). Everything went smoothly with both the GeForce 2 MX and the Voodoo 3 3000.
The only issue I had was with the Voodoo 3 and GLQuake with the miniGL driver - for some reason 1024 x 768 did not work (like it doesn't have enough video memory, although 16 MB should be plenty for 1024x768x16, as evidenced by the fact that all other tests work at 1024x768x16).
As can be seen, the GeForce 2 MX 400 dominates in every test. Also, the Elsa has remarkable 2D quality without any modifications (I had to modify most of my other GeForce 2 cards, by removing the RFI filtering). But not the Elsa, it hands down beats the 2D quality of the Voodoo 3 in DOS & Windows at all resolutions up to 1280x1024 (didn't try 1600x1200)

1MB P5BV3+ | AMD K6-2+ 550 MHz | 128 MB RAM PC133 CL2 | Elsa Gladiac GeForce 2 MX 400 32 MB 128 bit (driver 7.76)
2
3GLQuake	 640 x 480 - 166 FPS
4Quake 2 (3DNow Patch) 640 x 480 - 91 FPS
53DMark 2000 640 x 480 - 3680 points
6Expendable timedemo 640 x 480 - 36 FPS
7
8GLQuake	 1024 x 768 - 122 FPS
9Quake 2 (3DNow Patch) 1024 x 768 - 88 FPS
103DMark 2000 1024 x 768 - 3357 FPS
11Expendable timedemo 1024 x 768 - 34 FPS
12
13
14
15MB P5BV3+ | AMD K6-2+ 550 MHz | 128 MB RAM PC133 CL2 | 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP (latest official driver - 1.07)
16
17GLQuake	(miniGL) 640 x 480 - 155 FPS
18Quake 2 (3DNow Patch + miniGL) 640 x 480 - 84 FPS
193DMark 2000 640 x 480 - 1845 points
20Expendable timedemo 640 x 480 - 36 FPS
21
22GLQuake	(miniGL) 1024 x 768 - wouldn't run 
23Quake 2 (3DNow Patch + miniGL) 1024 x 768 - 76 FPS
243DMark 2000 1024 x 768 - 1770 points
25Expendable timedemo 1024 x 768 - 34

I'm having the same issue, in an extremely more powerful setup than yours (Asus A7V133 (KT133A + 686B) + AXP - Unusable = LOTS of CRC Errors).

My A7v133 (Via KT133 - Via 4 in 1 4.43v drivers) + 384mb PC133 + Atlhon XP at 2ghz with a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI in W98SE is giving me around 30fps in Quake II @ 1024x768, and 1473 3dmarks in 3dm2000.
Something is REALLY off, because the same system in Windows XP gives me around 3700+ 3dmarks and 60+ FPS in Q2.

I also moved the Voodoo 3 PCI to another machine I have, an Asus P2B-F + Pentium III 750mhz + 512mb PC100. In W98SE i got above 3000 points and 60+ fps in Q2.
Intel 440bx is ROCK SOLID.

I suspect it could be something wrong with the Via 4 in 1 drivers... maybe try to bench it on a clean install without the drivers, or perhaps an older version of them.

Interestingly I can't run "3dnow! software" rendering in Quake2, it defaults back to "software" when I try. The result is 15.1FPS @640x480.

I was actually referring to the normal software mode. You should see at least 22 - 23 FPS, but as I was suspecting, you only got 15 FPS. I would start from scratch with an OS reinstall and with VIA 4 in 1 drivers 4.35 (also, see my other suggestions in the previous posts).

Unfortunately that was on a fresh install using the older 4-in-1 and the newest official Voodoo 3 drivers as well as all of your BIOS suggestions.

Do you have V-Sync enabled / forced on?

What refresh rate is your monitor running at?

paradigital wrote on 2020-05-05, 17:59:

Unfortunately that was on a fresh install using the older 4-in-1 and the newest official Voodoo 3 drivers as well as all of your BIOS suggestions.

Are you using a sound card or any other devices in the ISA/PCI slots? Can you try and remove everything and see if there's any change?
For example, I had a very similar problem (on a different board), which, as I discovered, was caused by a USB 2.0 PCI card: Slow AMD K6-2+ 550 MHz performance?

Vsync is indeed OFF. It’s connected to a 70Hz display at the moment during testing.

It still seems to be more of a system wide slowdown rather than simply 3D, as I’ve compared my Sandra 2001 CPU bench with a friend’s 500MHz K6-3 and I’m around 270 MIPS (Dhrystone) behind, but only 10 MFLOPS (whetstone) down. My memory bandwidth ( with the 4way interleave patch) seems about right though.

Still down on 3DMark99 compared to my friends system (same CPU speed, same GPU, but MVP3 vs Aladdin chipset). His is hitting 3267 3DMarks and 7468 CPU marks, mine is still low at 2337 3DMarks and 5721 CPU 3DMarks.

Back to Quake2, running 3dnow! MiniGL rendering seems to not be GPU restricted as I get roughly the same 64FPS at 640x480 and 1024x768.

bloodem wrote on 2020-05-05, 18:26:

paradigital wrote on 2020-05-05, 17:59:

Unfortunately that was on a fresh install using the older 4-in-1 and the newest official Voodoo 3 drivers as well as all of your BIOS suggestions.

Are you using a sound card or any other devices in the ISA/PCI slots? Can you try and remove everything and see if there's any change?
For example, I had a very similar problem (on a different board), which, as I discovered, was caused by a USB 2.0 PCI card: Slow AMD K6-2+ 550 MHz performance?

I do have an AWE64 Gold in an ISA slot, and I do have a belkin USB 2.0 PCI card! I’ll pull both one by one and report back!

bloodem wrote on 2020-05-05, 18:26:

Are you using a sound card or any other devices in the ISA/PCI slots? Can you try and remove everything and see if there's any change?
For example, I had a very similar problem (on a different board), which, as I discovered, was caused by a USB 2.0 PCI card: Slow AMD K6-2+ 550 MHz performance?

Wow... that could be my issue. I have a VIA VT6214L USB 2.0 / VIA VT6421A Sata combo PCI controller.

I will try to remove it and try again. Thanks for the tip.