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Reply 40 of 84, by F2bnp

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Yes, I don't expect any miracles, maybe the increased FSB (if I can get it to be stable enough, which I highly doubt) will help out. A K6-III+ 550MHz is in between the Pentium II 350 and 400 for the most part. I can maybe hope to get between the 400 and 450 with this overclock 😜.

The Voodoo5 should perform almost identically to the Voodoo3 on this system 🙁. Anyway, when I'll get around to building that system I'll make a new thread about it with photos and such 😀.

Reply 43 of 84, by swaaye

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I got out the Intel D875PBZ mobo with a 3.4 GHz Northwood and dual channel PC3200. Again with the GeForce3 and Win98SE. The framerate at 1600x1200x32 was 50-120fps with DXGLR. I disabled vsync (I should have done this before).

I think the GeForce 3 is still bottlenecked by the CPU even at 1600x1200. These open area maps in Deus Ex are a real CPU killer.

Reply 44 of 84, by F2bnp

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Swaaye, is this under Win98 or XP? What drivers did you use?

I'm having a hard time with a Tualatin and an FX 5700. Seems like Via 4in1 is completely ruining performance with UTGLR (to the point where the other renderers are much faster!).

Reply 45 of 84, by swaaye

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98SE. I tried drivers 28.32 and 45.23. 5700 needs newer drivers though. You also need to use DXGLR 1.8 (the UTGLR for Deus Ex) for that to work on 98SE. It's on the old news page of his site.

Reply 46 of 84, by F2bnp

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Yeah, currently using 56.something for the 5700. I'm a dumbass, was using DXGLR 2.0. Will quickly grab 1.8 and try it, let's see how much the Tualatin 1.4 holds the card back. 😀

And yes, as expected, the "little" Tualatin is holding things back, no matter the resolution. When I'm looking at large, expansive areas of the game, the framerate is usually around the 30s, with the minimum framerate exhibited being 25fps. It usually hovers well above 30 though, 45-60fps.

I'm utterly baffled as well by how CPU intensive this game really is. It's funny seeing people with Celeron 400, K6-2 and K6-3 CPUs with Voodoo 3 cards from old forums and newsgroups, calling the game experience "silky smooth" on their systems 😊 . How the times have changed!

Reply 47 of 84, by F2bnp

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I've been fooling around with my new K6-III+ setup in the last couple of days. Got myself a nice P5A-B board and a modded Voodoo 5 with copper heatsinks from Stojke. So anyway, first finding, FSB increase does little to help the poor K6. I get pretty much identical results with 600MHz on a 100MHz FSB and 575MHz on a 115MHz FSB. Higher FSBs are out of the question, I can't get the damn thing stable at all. That's kind of shame 🙁.

Anyway, on-topic, I tried Deus Ex on this system, just out of curiosity. It is somewhat playable, definitely something I'd play back then, I think. First scene is an absolute killer, 10fps. Looking at the floor maxes out at 35fps, conversations usually 20-24fps. Most of the gameplay is between 17 and 21 fps. I'm thinking indoors will be a little smoother, but I don't really want to play that much on this system.
As suspected, graphic options help in absolutely no way. I get the same results at 640x480 and 1600x1200 with all details turned on. I thought I could maybe help the poor K6 by reducing sound quality, so I tried 11KHz and 8bit, but I got pretty much the same results once more.

b47.jpg

Keep in mind that at these frequencies, the K6-III+ is right between the Pentium II 350 and 400 in terms of performance, so pretty close to what the minimum system requirements were. I can easily see myself playing this back in 2000-2001. It's just that our standards have risen significantly in the years that followed.

Reply 48 of 84, by swaaye

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In 2000-2001 I ran P3 Coppermine 700@900 and then Duron 800@1050. We might have differing perceptions of those years. 😎 Duron really motivated K6 people to move on as I recall.

Reply 49 of 84, by F2bnp

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Yes, Duron was a big step and certainly far better than Celerons of the time. If it weren't for those damn motherboard chipsets 😵 .

We have different experiences, not perceptions. You were rocking some pretty kickass systems for the time. I was way too young and very glad to own my first PC, which was the previous family computer, a Pentium 133 system. I could sometimes fool around on my older brother's PIII 733, I remember playing a lot of Quake III there 😀. That was late 2000, early 2001.
All I'm saying is, that if you weren't too keen on constantly upgrading (the race to hitting 1GHz was very exciting, but also very painful to the wallets 😜) your system, you could accept playing like this. I know how it feels, used to have subpar systems trying to play newer games for years. 😢

Next up, I'll give Deus Ex a go on my Tualatin 1.4 with the Voodoo5. Should prove to be interesting 😀.

Reply 50 of 84, by swaaye

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I was 20-21 years old at the time and in college. I didn't have much money but I was always looking for the next hot overclocking value. And there was the peer pressure of being surrounded by geeks like us during perhaps the most exciting era of PC 3D gaming evolution.

Tualatin will certainly run the game a lot better. But I think my Northwood 3.4 setup was still a bit of a bottleneck with even just a GeForce3. Even at 1600x1200!

Reply 51 of 84, by F2bnp

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It sure was exciting 😀. I am about 12 years younger than you, so there's that 😁. I didn't have time to fool around too much today but I'll certainly give it a go tomorrow, perhaps Glide will help things out

Last edited by F2bnp on 2015-04-27, 10:49. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 52 of 84, by F2bnp

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So, it took a while, because I wanted to be sure. Tried the game on the following system:

Tualatin 1.4-S
512MB RAM
QDI Advance 10T
Voodoo 5 5500
Aureal Vortex 2
Win98SE

Performance is somewhat poor for my taste. Anything above 1024x768 is probably GPU limited, but at 1024x768 and below the game is very CPU limited. I made sure of that by overclocking the Voodoo 5 to 183MHz (default is 166MHz) and witnessed the same performance at 1024x768, on the scenes that made the framerate take dive that is.

A3D certainly steals some CPU cycles, as I saw performance improve slightly when disabling Hardware Audio Acceleration. So how slow is it?

Well, the first few scenes struggle at around 30-35 fps. Lowest framerate is around 25, but it's usually above 30. Then, it's all over the place. You can see it hit 60, then be around 45-48fps. For the most part, I'd say it jumps around 38-50fps. Unfortunately, this QDI board does not allow overclocking ( I can pick Default, 133MHz or 136MHz 😵 ). Is there any worthwhile software that would help me increase the FSB through Windows on such a board? I think it'd be interesting to try.

Reply 54 of 84, by F2bnp

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Falloutboy, thanks for the suggestion. Softfsb didn't work for me, but CPUFSB did, so you did help me out 😀. The way these tools work is, you have to look for the PLL on your mainboard and select it from the supported list. Unfortunately, Softfsb didn't support the PLL on my motherboard, but CPUFSB did. I was able to easily raise the FSB to 150MHz, thus clocking the CPU at 1575MHz.

This really helped with the performance. With this setup, the lowest framerate is 32 and that's just in the first scene. Gameplay was much much better. 50-70fps most of the time, although I did fool around a bit more this time round, so maybe it wasn't THAT bad on the stock settings either. Then again, I did fool around more, which means it was probably more pleasant. 😊
Anyway, all of this with the Voodoo5 clocked at 183MHz and running at 1024x768 with 3D Audio using the Vortex 2. 800x600 basically runs the game exactly as fast. I didn't really try higher resolutions or any AA options, I might try that tomorrow 😀.

Reply 55 of 84, by boxpressed

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Just tested Deus Ex GOTY on my KT133A / Athlon XP 2400+ system. Using a Quadro DCC (45.23), which is basically a GF 3. Tested at 1024x768 (16 bpp, high details) with a Vortex 2 and Hardware 3D support.

Intro cinematic scene averages about 82 FPS just as it fades to black before the spinning logo.

I get between 40-50 FPS on Liberty Island just skulking around the area where you first encounter enemies.

Like UT, I had to change the vsync variable to "True" in order to turn off vsync. (Seems backward, I know.) Before I did that, I got almost exactly 75 FPS on the spinning logo; after, I get 224.

Reply 57 of 84, by calvin

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DirectX 10. I played through the game fine on 1680x1050 all high on Intel HD Graphics (on i5-560M) with Windows 8.1 smoothly.

2xP2 450, 512 MB SDR, GeForce DDR, Asus P2B-D, Windows 2000
P3 866, 512 MB RDRAM, Radeon X1650, Dell Dimension XPS B866, Windows 7
M2 @ 250 MHz, 64 MB SDE, SiS5598, Compaq Presario 2286, Windows 98

Reply 58 of 84, by vogamer

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calvin wrote:

DirectX 10. I played through the game fine on 1680x1050 all high on Intel HD Graphics (on i5-560M) with Windows 8.1 smoothly.

Thx for replying, no one needs to answer and I'm not spitting fire, however I'm curious, why are the peeps here playing this on 3dfx cards and old P2 class machines? This makes no sense to me, which is why I'm asking.

Also, which is better to play 1st? Deus Ex (GOTY) or Deus Ex 2?

Reply 59 of 84, by DosFreak

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No one is playing Deus Ex on a P2 (although technicaly you can). Some people want to play games on the systems or graphics cards the games were designed for. Some people want to play old games at 4k resolutions with newer renderers.

Any sane person would say Deus Ex 1 but some people like cramped consolified games so those people like Deus Ex 2.

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