seems normal, you can speed it up with fastvid https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-graphics-boost.html

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-09-13, 00:39:

seems normal, you can speed it up with fastvid https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-graphics-boost.html

According to these benchmarks, a Pentium 200 gets around 16FPS with the same settings, I'm getting 14 with a Celeron 500, maybe he has fastvid running but I didn't see that anywhere on there.

Thank you for reminding me of fastvid, I've never used it before and there's performance to be gained there.

[EDIT]
Forgot to link the actual benchmarks themselves, apologies.

https://framebuffer.io/project/quake

I feel as if I should be getting at least 35FPS as a Celeron 500 was extremely close to the latter Pentium IIs in terms of performance. On the Pentium III 1GHz, where a Pentium III 800 is getting 65FPS, I would expect that it would be around 75FPS or maybe even 80. I don't see why it's performing so badly. I used to run Quake on a 500MHz Katmai with an Intel 740 Graphics card and Quake was more than playable at 640x480 in DOS, I'd guess around 40ish FPS.

This wouldn't be such a big deal, but I'm trying to run a lot of 3D accelerated games and I know some of them (such as Half-Life) tax the CPU heavily. If a top of the line CPU from 2000 can't software render a game playably at VGA resolution that was made 4 years prior, when CPUs weren't 1GHz but 20% that speed for the top of the line model, something's wrong. I just can't think of what's going wrong, the RAM is fine, the CPUs are fine, the video card is good, it's just as if there's some serious bottleneck going on and I don't know where it's coming from.

If you want something newer you can try MTRRLFBE as well http://rayer.g6.cz/programm/programe.htm

DosFreak wrote on 2022-09-13, 01:04:

If you want something newer you can try MTRRLFBE as well http://rayer.g6.cz/programm/programe.htm

Thank you. I'll try this and see if maybe it just has something to do with that.

MTRRLFBE was able to initialize when I used the parameters "VGA," and "WC," but it had no impact on performance, still at exactly 14 FPS.

well, try the other one

I tried fastvid and am now seeing 29FPS, which seems to be closer to that of a Pentium II 300, so major progress has been made, I am very thankful for the help. I feel like this is closer to what I should be seeing on the Celeron.

[EDIT]
Just reinstalled the Pentium III, and it runs at 42FPS with fastvid enabled. Not anywhere near the 70 or so FPS it should be, but it's a start. I'm going to run a few benchmarks on the system to try and see what else (if anything) is actually affected by this.

I've just ran all of Sisoft Sandra's benchmarks, as well as 3DMark 99, and the CPU performs exactly as it should in both cases. Maybe this isn't computer specific, but rather Quake specific?

athlon_p0wer wrote on 2022-09-13, 08:16:

I've just ran all of Sisoft Sandra's benchmarks, as well as 3DMark 99, and the CPU performs exactly as it should in both cases. Maybe this isn't computer specific, but rather Quake specific?

I think its a integrated videocard with shared memory specific. Try to maximize RAM speed or add i810 videoram cache module/chip if its possible.

Here the place for i810 cache chips place (need some electronics and soldering skills)

Babasha wrote on 2022-09-13, 08:20:

I think its a integrated videocard with shared memory specific. Try to maximize RAM speed or add i810 videoram cache module/chip if its possible.

I would try but I honestly have no soldering skills, let alone soldering something that small. As far as RAM goes, I have all the latency options available set to 2. It's running at 335MB/s according to Sisoft Sandra.

Here, your Quake is running under software rendering or hardware accelerated 3d ?
It's odd because even in software rendering, your 9250 PCI graphics card should be more than enough to have good results.

Romain wrote on 2022-09-13, 08:45:

Here, your Quake is running under software rendering or hardware accelerated 3d ?
It's odd because even in software rendering, your 9250 PCI graphics card should be more than enough to have good results.

I'm running Quake under software rendering in DOS at the moment, though I'll be running it under 3D accelerated mode later on. Indeed, the Radeon 9250 increases the performance in Quake over the integrated graphics. I'm not sure exactly what's going on here now that I've ran a few synthetic CPU benchmarks as well as 3D accelerated benchmarks and found that all run fine.