AFAIK this game isn't hardware accelerated so it will not use your voodoo 2 like Unreal does. If you press one of the F keys (not sure if it was F5 or F4) you can set the game to lower/higher resolution.
As for the game being choppy, keep in mind we were spoiled by high frame rates and resolutions for years, so our perception of smooth today is quite different of what we had in the past.

gaffa2002 wrote on 2022-08-25, 11:10:

AFAIK this game isn't hardware accelerated so it will not use your voodoo 2 like Unreal does. If you press one of the F keys (not sure if it was F5 or F4) you can set the game to lower/higher resolution.
As for the game being choppy, keep in mind we were spoiled by high frame rates and resolutions for years, so our perception of smooth today is quite different of what we had in the past.

Yes, I actually didn't mean to refer to hw acceleration, the game is not accelerated, but I thought about other potential bottlenecks, either CPU/RAM/S3 etc...
But anyways, perception has changed for sure, after briefly trying the GOG version I wanted to give it a shot on real HW, as the game does not appear to be demanding in terms of hardware.

For me the speed you are describing sounds about right. A P166 MMX just isn't enough for smooth 2d in anything beyond 320x200. I mean, smooth for current standards of course as I remember playing it on my P133 and thinking it was smooth too. But then again I also used to think Duke Nukem 3D and Tomb Raider ran smooth on this same system in SVGA 😁.

Yes, Blood Omen is demanding on CPUs of the era. I remember trying it on a Cyrix 6x86 P166 back in 2007 and how shocked I was with the performance. At the time I blamed the poor Cyrix, but since then I've tried the game on faster PMMX and Pentium II processors and seen how it scales. As such, don't expect full performance out of that MMX 166 as, funny as it may seem, high resolution 2D games provide very different loads compared to 3D games of the era (which are offloaded to a significant degree to GPUs) and can prove demanding.

Blood Omen on PC suffers from other issues as well, such as the fact that the maximum framerate is 40FPS for some reason. So, even on faster systems, it feels sluggish and very off. It's also plagued by mono audio in cutscenes and various other little quirks. I suggest trying Verok's patch, it fixes a lot of these issues. You can find more on PCGamingWiki's entry for the game.