Disruptor wrote on 2022-10-13, 08:23:

Trident, Oak and Realtek are known to be rock bottom in performance.

There are some exceptions. I once came across an Oak OTI-087 ISA card that kept up with various Diamond ISA cards that I had. It was a very decent performer in DOS games & benchmarks.

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-10-13, 05:48:

Finally got around to test my Pentium MMX 200 out and was absolutely floored when I saw how poor the performance of Doom 2 was. With only a graphics card installed on a new 6.22, no other software, no TSR's, no mouse, no sound, nothing other than a raw, basic system, I get maybe 10-15 FPS. Granted, my only other reference of this game is from 1994 so it's rather old, but I vividly remember my lowly specced 486 SX 33 felt more responsive than this. Even Wolfenstein 3D runs poorly, with maybe twice the FPS and is visually lagging, a game that runs perfect on a 386.

Motherboard is an Intel LT430TX with a Trident TVGA9000i to an old Samsung 4:3 LCD VGA monitor. There are no relevant settings on the motherboard other than speed of processor which is set correctly and the only setting in BIOS that I could find which would possible affect the performance is "memory cache" and is enabled. This is the result from Speedsys and a picture of the later completed system.

What is going on. Is this the best a Pentium MMX 200 can do? Is my memory from '94 rose tinted?

No this isn't the best Pentium MMX 200 can do. The reason you are seeing this is because of the ISA card bandwidth which becomes a bad combination with P5 CPUs. As others suggested, PCI cards and ISA cards are more synced with how the P5 handles other stuffs. Additionally, 128MB memory may hurt because P5 can cache 64MB and the rest 64MB will run uncached, thereby limiting the entire memory pool.

Cacheable area isn't affected in DOS. So it doesn't matter in this case.

The main issue here is that ISA card. Doom and Doom II render each frame directly on the video card, and that requires lots of bandwidth (not only to transfer pixels, but also lot's of OUT instructions are used to set video card registers). Framerate will be better on low quality on that ISA card. If you try some port that uses a backbuffer to render the scene the FPS will be much more (for example MBF or FastDoom).

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-10-13, 06:24:

The reason I got the Trident card is that I wanted to try out the VGATV since my only VGA CRT is a rather shitty 17" to instead run it on my Sony 21" CRT TV via SCART RGB. There's a Trio64 in that list, maybe I should try out one of those. Best I could find within EU on Ebay is unfortunately a wee bit more than 5€, but rather 30€.

Find a PCI video card from e-waste if your local government allows; got mine for 3€. I assume those ridiculous price tags have something to do with EU policies on e-wastes.

Thanks for all the answers and suggestions, it would seem that I need a PCI card to get most out of the Doom games, and I say that because now I have tested some other games. Rise of the Triad runs almost as bad as Doom 2, about the same as Doom but Heretic runs absolutely flawlessly, no stuttering of any kind and I would estimate it runs about 4-5 times as fast as Doom 2 and Hexen runs almost as good as Heretic. Most surprisingly, Duke 3D also runs very good, even in the mirror scene, about the same speed as Hexen, or about 3 times as fast as Doom 2. Most perplexing.

Heretic/Hexen uses same Doom engine but it renders on RAM before copying it to the video card. Same for Duke 3D. That avoids completely the ISA bus bottleneck, thus making it much faster on your videocard.

Doom used mode Y and the other games mode 13h, mode Y was much slower on those trident cards.

dondiego wrote on 2022-10-18, 11:27:

Doom used mode Y and the other games mode 13h, mode Y was much slower on those trident cards.

Dont ya love all the weird and crazy that DOS games addressed video cards, really was the wild west back then.

Garrett W wrote on 2022-10-13, 07:56:

not to mention 486 systems regularly came with VLB slots

My first ever PC was a 486 with PCI Cirrus Logic graphics card, and I had no idea what VLB is until much later. Were 486 PCI motherboards so unusual though?

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-10-13, 05:48:

What is going on. Is this the best a Pentium MMX 200 can do? Is my memory from '94 rose tinted?

Try increasing the ISA bus frequency in the BIOS SETUP (that is decreasing the clock divider). You may also try other FSB/CPU clock combinations, as to increase the ISA bus frequency, even if it slows the CPU a little.

Trident cards are zero wait state cards, but I really don´t know how it compares with others ISA VGA cards.

Are you running the game in 320x240 or higher resolution? The higher resolution you get, the more of a bottleneck the ISA bus becames.

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-10-18, 08:56:

Thanks for all the answers and suggestions, it would seem that I need a PCI card to get most out of the Doom games, and I say that because now I have tested some other games. Rise of the Triad runs almost as bad as Doom 2, about the same as Doom but Heretic runs absolutely flawlessly, no stuttering of any kind and I would estimate it runs about 4-5 times as fast as Doom 2 and Hexen runs almost as good as Heretic. Most surprisingly, Duke 3D also runs very good, even in the mirror scene, about the same speed as Hexen, or about 3 times as fast as Doom 2. Most perplexing.

My first PC ever was a Pentium 200 MMX, with 32MB of RAM, an Opti931 ISA Sound Card, 2GB HDD AND a Trident 9440 1MB PCI video card. Doom 2 was obliterated, It was very fast in 640 x 480. I didn't ran tests ate the time. If you manage to get any PCI VGA card that runs on DOS and don't get exceptional results with Doom 2, You have a problem with your motherboard or even your CPU. But I would get another MB for testing the CPU. A Pentium 200 MMX is a very fast machine for several DOS games. I've finished Tomb Raider on it; if you're getting bad FPS on Doom 2, it's your video card. If it's not, It's your MB.

Yes, the CPU is fast enough by far, but Doom only ran in 320x200.

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-10-13, 08:12:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-10-13, 08:11:

Also, as others have pointed out, not all ISA graphics cards are the same. Some perform better than others.

Obviously.

Just change your graphics card if you want to test or play DOOM.

Try getting a Trident ProVidia 9685 PCI video card, several of them has TV output.

Vresiberba wrote on 2022-10-13, 05:48:

Finally got around to test my Pentium MMX 200 out and was absolutely floored when I saw how poor the performance of Doom 2 was. With only a graphics card installed on a new 6.22, no other software, no TSR's, no mouse, no sound, nothing other than a raw, basic system, I get maybe 10-15 FPS. Granted, my only other reference of this game is from 1994 so it's rather old, but I vividly remember my lowly specced 486 SX 33 felt more responsive than this. Even Wolfenstein 3D runs poorly, with maybe twice the FPS and is visually lagging, a game that runs perfect on a 386.

Motherboard is an Intel LT430TX with a Trident TVGA9000i to an old Samsung 4:3 LCD VGA monitor. There are no relevant settings on the motherboard other than speed of processor which is set correctly and the only setting in BIOS that I could find which would possible affect the performance is "memory cache" and is enabled. This is the result from Speedsys and a picture of the later completed system.

What is going on. Is this the best a Pentium MMX 200 can do? Is my memory from '94 rose tinted?

S3 work great with vgatv and are less tan 10 euro here in europe

I use vgatv with a VLB Cirrus Logic and i get 28-32fps in doom, and is a 486 DX2