AFAIK it runs smooth at 640x480.

non sli, single tmu v1 scores about 30fps in q2 with swapinterval=0. if swapinterval=1, there should be about 24fps

slightly depens on tmu memory size. about 1 fps

anthony wrote:

non sli, single tmu v1 scores about 30fps in q2 with swapinterval=0. if swapinterval=1, there should be about 24fps

As I imagined. And I would not be surprised to see it still runs good in OpenGL standard.

Not very well by today's standards, that is.

I didn't do a lot of tweaking but Unreal seemed to run better than Quake II on the Voodoo. Pretty impressive considering.

Voodoo Graphic based accelerator didn't run very well Quake 2

Apparently Riva 128 can run it faster and with overall better IQ.

A Voodoo's fine. There wasn't really performance complaints about it with Quake2 then because it was probably the hottest game to play on that card when it came out, having lightmapped colored lights available for your pleasure in 1997. 60fps spoiling wasn't a general thing until the following year, and giving too much framerate to Quake2 makes the game feel watery and slippery anyway (you'll REALLY notice those wobbling vertices)

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Apparently Riva 128 can run it faster and with overall better IQ.

yeah that low precision banded multiply blend on the world with only square textures allowed (leading to strange blurring/aliasing in places) sure looks better 😐

Riva128 was never known for their image quality.

leileilol wrote:

A Voodoo's fine. There wasn't really performance complaints about it with Quake2 then because it was probably the hottest game […]
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A Voodoo's fine. There wasn't really performance complaints about it with Quake2 then because it was probably the hottest game to play on that card when it came out, having lightmapped colored lights available for your pleasure in 1997. 60fps spoiling wasn't a general thing until the following year, and giving too much framerate to Quake2 makes the game feel watery and slippery anyway (you'll REALLY notice those wobbling vertices)

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Apparently Riva 128 can run it faster and with overall better IQ.

yeah that low precision banded multiply blend on the world with only square textures allowed (leading to strange blurring/aliasing in places) sure looks better 😐

Riva128 was never known for their image quality.

Thank. That's why I wasn't sure when I heard this. Now that I think more I maybe remember running Quake2 on the V1 at something like 25-30fps on timedemo 1 (?) and something similar on the Riva128 PCI but about quality, the Voodoo1 on a CRT still was quiet soft on details with the cable and imho not the best vga output (compared to the usual V2) but the Riva128 final rendering imho wasn't the expected one by the game even if it was imho one impressive fast Direct3D card with impressive latest drivers.

Going back to 512x384 brings a big fps improvementz on the voodoo1

dr.zeissler wrote:

Going back to 512x384 brings a big fps improvementz on the voodoo1

But not big enough. 320x240 would have been nice as a choice, giving it a pure speed advantage over software rather than also boosting the clarity. Why is it not supported on Voodoo?

Reputator wrote:

I didn't do a lot of tweaking but Unreal seemed to run better than Quake II on the Voodoo. Pretty impressive considering.

To be fair, the Quake games were never meant to be hyper-optimized for any particular pieces of graphics hardware at the time of their releases. The temporary reliance on mini-drivers is a testament to how flaky the market still was, and the true target hardware was a hypothetical 100% OpenGL compliant future card with no driver hacks. Either that, or a $10000+ workstation machine.
60 FPS on the Voodoo 1 and a Pentium 2 means using Glide and meticulously tuning the engine to avoid any bottlenecks.

silikone wrote:

Not very well by today's standards, that is.

Yah I swear a lot of games "felt" playable when you got over 15fps or so and butter smooth over 25.... I think it's that microstutter thing that didn't seem to exist until dx8 or so, where ppl, wanted 60fps so as not to get the drops.

yes from what I have seen 640x480 was pushing it to much and you had to go for lower resolutions, Voodoo II is a huge improvement on this game.

In my own tests A Voodoo1 paired with a Klamath PII delivers a stable ~25fps @ 640x480.

BitWrangler wrote:

silikone wrote:

Not very well by today's standards, that is.

Yah I swear a lot of games "felt" playable when you got over 15fps or so and butter smooth over 25.... I think it's that microstutter thing that didn't seem to exist until dx8 or so, where ppl, wanted 60fps so as not to get the drops.

I think it was also from the lack of "proper 3D", at lest up until later 90's. Most of the gameplay and shooting revovled around the horizontal plane where you didn't have to worry too much about height and overall positioning, like for example Duke Nukem 3D.

BitWrangler wrote:

silikone wrote:

Not very well by today's standards, that is.

Yah I swear a lot of games "felt" playable when you got over 15fps or so and butter smooth over 25.... I think it's that microstutter thing that didn't seem to exist until dx8 or so, where ppl, wanted 60fps so as not to get the drops.

Don't quote me on this, but software rendering should have lower input lag, as data is ready to be sent straight to the framebuffer once the CPU has completed its cycle.

I setup a '96 era PC using PCem, and with the Voodoo 1 6MB, and a P200 Quake 2 runs pretty good at 640x480 aswell. I don't think Quake 2 was all that demanding IMO.

Define pretty well. If 20-30fps is your thing, then sure 😉.

Fusion wrote:

I setup a '96 era PC using PCem, and with the Voodoo 1 6MB, and a P200 Quake 2 runs pretty good at 640x480 aswell. I don't think Quake 2 was all that demanding IMO.

With the steps taken to optimize for the CPU in the GL renderer, it should be running well. One thing Quake 1 suffered from was fully sized glTexSubImage2D as well as the good ol' glVertex functions.
Quake 2 introduced the concept of a dedicated dynamic lightmap block. All the baked world lighting resides statically in the memory. Instead of updating these entries to add dynamic lighting, a different lightmap is used temporarily for the faces that are being affected by dynamic lighting, decreasing a typical lightmap update to a half block. Half-Life didn't implement this, so the flashlight gives the performance a fate worse than stroggification.