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Improving Turok performance on socket 3 hardware, possible?

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First post, by Chadti99

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I’ve noticed with sound off that Turok is quite playable on either my POD100 or AMD5x86 180 machines paired with a Voodoo. As soon as I enable sound, things go downhill fast. Maybe this platform just can’t muster enough grunt to do it with audio, but it seems like it’s close. Adjusting the sound quality down to 11kHz seems to help but are there any other audio options worth changing? Is there a sound card that might offload some of the work from the CPU?

I do see a measurable performance difference in quake with the -wavonly option, compared to default direct sound. Maybe there is a similar option for Turok?

Does Turok have any way to measure fps?

Thanks for any help, ideas, suggestions!

Reply 1 of 8, by Chadti99

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Well, as always rtfm. I checked the readme.txt and it had a few suggestions on improving performance around sound settings with command line options.

-enableHardwareMixing (bypasses direct sound for mixing)
-output11k
-disableambientsounds (probably makes the biggest difference)

Adding all these in def gains a few frames but difficult to know exactly without some kind of FPS counter or in-game bench.

Reply 2 of 8, by Chadti99

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Lol, I found the in-game benchmark as well!

Just add -benchmark to command line options. Results incoming! This is quite a long benchmark. Maybe the demo version has a shorter one?

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Reply 4 of 8, by Chadti99

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leileilol wrote on 2021-08-20, 18:44:

The demo version benchmark is just as long. The only real difference is that you won't be getting any 22khz sounds

Got it, thanks for the confirmation, testing so far is proving the 11kHz option makes the biggest difference.

So far, with all the console options mentioned above.

AMD5X86 @ 180 w/Voodoo3 = 21.3fps
POD83 @ 100 w/Voodoo2 = 24.5fps

Things are quite a bit more playable, I need to double check but without these options you lose around 4-5fps. I really thought the 5x86 would pull ahead given the faster clocks but it comes at a price with lower caches timings and maybe Turok relies on the FPU in a similar way that Quake does.

Reply 5 of 8, by Chadti99

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Quick update:

POD100
LS486-c2
Voodoo3
Awe64 Value
32mb EDO
256k cache
Fastest timings

512 no sound = 30.3
512 with sound, all command line options = 25.7
512 with sound, all cl options, CDDA Audio = 24.2
512 with sound, no command line options = 20.3

Pretty happy with the playability at the 25fps average considering the hardware. Now curious if there are any other early Windows Glide games that could be tweaked to run half decent on this platform. Turok is using glide right, if you select the 3dfx renderer?

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