just use S3VBE20 on the trio and be done with it, the CPU will be the bottleneck anyway. also ati cards aren't that highly regarded for DOS and anecdotally i've also had lockups in duke3d on the original radeon, but never cared to look more into those.

Doesn't the Rage Pro still have a TSR for VESA 2.0 ?

Okay, I'll give that a shot. Running in Vesa isn't a REQUIREMENT anyway, I just thought it'd be nice. I'll try that and if everything still runs like poopy, I'll come back to the forums and ask for advice on a decent card for Vesa/SVGA play.

As far as I can tell from MSD, it's got Vesa version 2.0, so I'm not sure why it's not working.

if the card's BIOS has an iffy VESA 2.0 implementation, at least duke3d might work by using NOLFB, since that game has fallback code for using banked VESA. but again, you seem to be quite overvaluing video card importance here and really whiplash is known to run very badly on period systems.

I guess I should install NFS SE and see how that goes. If whiplash runs like crud no matter what, that's fine, it's not even that good, I just wanted to try something in SVGA. Also running Duke in VESA isn't that important, again, just wanted to see if I COULD and get a decent speed.

EDIT Also I don't quite understand. A Pentium 120mhz CPU is a bottleneck on Duke Nukem 3D? this confuses me

just to clarify, if you've run duke3d on your diamond card in 640x480 you've already run it in VESA, just banked VESA 1.2 instead of linear 2.0 (which you can get by using the aforementioned S3VBE20 to gain a couple of frames).

and yes, of course a p120 will bottleneck, it's a DOS software renderer where the video card acts as nothing more than a dumb framebuffer. the CPU is doing all of the work here. there's plenty of people who have a fetish for running the original DOS version at 1600x1200 and such even though it's entirely pointless on a CRT, and will use athlon XP and faster CPUs to do so.

tomexplodes wrote on 2020-06-20, 01:48:

I guess I should install NFS SE and see how that goes. If whiplash runs like crud no matter what, that's fine, it's not even that good, I just wanted to try something in SVGA. Also running Duke in VESA isn't that important, again, just wanted to see if I COULD and get a decent speed.

EDIT Also I don't quite understand. A Pentium 120mhz CPU is a bottleneck on Duke Nukem 3D? this confuses me

It depends at what resolution you are running it. At 1600x1200, for example, both the CPU and the PCI bus would likely be bottlenecks on a Pentium 1 system .
At 320x200 or even 640x480, that Pentium 120 should be plenty enough, if memory serves .

darry wrote on 2020-06-20, 02:08:

At 320x200 or even 640x480, that Pentium 120 should be plenty enough, if memory serves .

plenty to not pose a bottleneck? easy to prove that wrong with a quick look at dukebencTim.txt, on a matrox millennium going from p120 to p166 nets an extra 20 fps in 320x200, and an extra 6.5 fps in 640x480. same story with a p180, just 2fps less on the latter.

Thank you for explaining. And yes, with the Diamond (S3) card back in running the proper VBE, I get much better framerates on Duke in 640x480. Again, I'm not sure I care to run it over 320x200 since it looks just great on my 13 inch CRT, I'm just playing with hardware and trying to understand why things do/don't work.

i've run it on pentium 133 in 640x480 and consider it quite playable, it's one of those few games where the minimal spec (dx2/66) doesn't actually seem like pulled from thin air. i just find it interesting how I/O bottlenecked it is, smartdrive is an absolute must in DOS and win95's 32-bit disk access helps tremendously as well, to eliminate those asset loading hitches.

it's basically the complete opposite of quake, which has a much higher rendering load (p133 is effectively minimum spec for decent-ish gameplay at 320x200 there), but doesn't have those I/O issues at all, running totally fine without smartdrive under DOS given sufficient RAM.

auron wrote on 2020-06-20, 02:26:

darry wrote on 2020-06-20, 02:08:

At 320x200 or even 640x480, that Pentium 120 should be plenty enough, if memory serves .

plenty to not pose a bottleneck? easy to prove that wrong with a quick look at dukebencTim.txt, on a matrox millennium going from p120 to p166 nets an extra 20 fps in 320x200, and an extra 6.5 fps in 640x480. same story with a p180, just 2fps less on the latter.

What I meant by "plenty enough" was plenty enough to be playable, which I believe is the main point. Sorry if I did not make that clear enough . Over 60 FPS at 320x200 is quite attainable on a P120 and quite sufficient, IMHO . Admittedly, FPS in the twenties at 640x480 is insufficient by today's standards (perception was different back in the mid nineties) . My bad. In my defence, I did say "if memory serves" .

There is always going to be an absolute bottleneck somewhere, either with processing speed or bandwidth . The question is whether the performance attained is sufficient or not for acceptable game play .

Try to use UniVBE 6.7, it helps to run Duke 3D on some laptops with resolution higher than 320x240

P120 can't be bottleneck in this case, cause even my mobile P120 gives me about 24fps at 640x480 resolution using NeoMagic 2093