Reply 20 of 23, by F2bnp
- Rank
- l33t
I just realized that Looking Glass Studios' Dark Engine used in the Thief games and System Shock 2 was also a massive hog for CPU time. Minimum CPU requirements for Thief 1 called for a measly P166 in late 1998... yeah right, even a Pentium Pro/II can and will struggle greatly in many areas. I'm thinking the very impressive soundscape didn't make matters any easier. I wonder if using A3D helped any or if it actually added even more load. I could see how they could conceivably accelerate a lot of what Thief was doing on an Aureal chip, but it was probably too much of a hassle anyway.
Somewhat recently, I had an old desktop unit just laying around and I decided I needed to make a quick buck, plus it wouldn't hurt to shift some redundant hardware from the house. It was an i815 board paired with a Pentium III 1GHz and I only really needed to fit it with a video card to sell it as a complete system and the only spares I had laying around were Riva TNT cards. So, I grabbed a Viper V550 and installed it, whilst thinking to myself just how much I was hampering that CPU with this video card. And yet, I was very surprised when I set it up and started doing some tests out of curiosity. Pretty much all of the relevant games from 1997-1999 and even some from 2000 ran particularly great on that TNT, albeit at low resolutions of course, so 640x480 and 800x600.
It was a surprise seeing a lot of games running really well on this, which really drives the point that most of these games were severely CPU limited at the time and even a single Voodoo2 would have been enough for pretty much everything up until a certain point, provided you had a good CPU.
