That is a very slow CPU for Serious Sam. That game was released just a few months before the Pentium4 2Ghz for reference.

Dirilu wrote:

If I cant run serius sam I am getting big problem running quake 3.

Just to be clear — you've tried running Quake 3 and also got low FPS? Because I'm running Q3 on a very similar system and it runs fine.

Quake3 was released in 1999. So it should run fine on P3-650. SS would be fine with something around 1GHz.

V5 likes faster CPUs, that could be the issue.

Thanks, I will try a faster CPU ... 😀

but on the box and the internet the recomendation is a Pentium 3 - 550 Mhz. so can it still be the slow CPU ?

Serious Sam runs "alright" on my Coppermine 800 + Geforce 4 Ti at 800x600. In the realm of 30FPS. I don't remember being blown away by high settings and a butter frame rate on SS until I was on a 9800 Pro + Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz. If you can pull off finding a Pentium 3 1000mhz, I think you would find the game runs quite nicely (but still not perfectly smooth).

In those days 20 FPS was considered acceptable for a minimum frame rate. Most of my game programming related books from the mid 90s to early 00s used to suggest aiming for 12-13 FPS as acceptable before things become a slide show. In fact I think my copy of SS TFE may have a PII 300Mhz listed as the minimum. "Recommended system specs" generally was to get near 30 FPS (where today people expect 60).

Amazing how spoiled by frame rates we've become with 144hz monitors and such.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5hIYfEbjnA

Found a low quality video but you can see the the same video card on a better CPU here.

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Most of my game programming related books from the mid 90s to early 00s used to suggest aiming for 12-13 FPS as acceptable before things become a slide show.

Which ironically is not a euphemism as many games back then were literally slide-shows (Myst and clones, Hypercard anyone?).

Sam's definitely CPU bound. To go that slow with a video card would mean one of these.