I76 was quite sluggish yes, but on the other hand it's fine-tuned for a 20-30fps game experience, and putting too much speed on there (60fps+) makes your rockets and 'throwers short range. 😀 also it looks rough and has cutscenes looking as rough on purpose for stylistic consistency (And 3dsmax didn't have good character animation tools then, this was pre-dancingbaby 3dsmax used. only 3dsmax was used, no poweranimator/lightwave/etc)

IIRC I76 had a DIrect3D patch first, then came all the vendor API specific renderers in a later patch/Gold/Nitro.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-21, 21:39:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-01-21, 08:51:

The intro music sounds very familiar. Are you RetroCompaqGuy?

Nope, not me. I just linked to the video. 😀

That would be me 😀 When I made those first videos showing performance differences wasnt my concern, just the visual. If I'd redo any, it would certainly be a topic.

Cybertroopers Virtual-On was released in 1997 for PC with insane system requirements on the box. Recommended P200 (which was one of the top of the line CPUs)

The MMX 'graphics' push was full of that in 1997. There was a Sailor Moon activity center that was unoptimized as hell and required MMX. There were also some Direct3D games with choices for software MMX rasterizers for the sake of having the MMX seal on the box cover's corner (not even a P2 300 in 1997 could handle it). Thank goodness Cyrix and AMD had MMX instructions supported that year because 😬 MMX was treated as a form of resistance against 3d accelerators like they'd never catch on.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-21, 21:39:

Nope, not me. I just linked to the video. :) […]
Show full quote

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-01-21, 08:51:

The intro music sounds very familiar. Are you RetroCompaqGuy?

Nope, not me. I just linked to the video. 😀

Tetrium wrote on 2023-01-21, 16:20:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-01-21, 07:43:

From what I can remember, Interstate 76 was a slideshow on our 200 MHz MMX PC. Maybe it was because of the 2MB CL-GD5446 and the lack of a real 3D accelerator.

I remember playing Interstate 76 back on my friends PC with Pentium MMX 166MHz, Rendition 2100 and Voodoo 1. It had its slowdown moments from what I remember but it was definitely playable. Still remember designing cars with heaps of firerite rockets or guided missiles and the blox dropper to combat the ai with xD 😜
So my guess would be it's your graphics card.

I believe the original game (before the Nitro and Arsenal versions) was software-rendered only out of the box. I could be wrong... maybe it had Rendition support? But I know it didn't support 3dfx. It's been a while, and it's hard to find much about that version since the game got a lot more popular once it had 3dfx support. With the CPUs most people were running in 1997, software-only rendering was certainly a tall order for a game with so much going on. I remember the resolution being so low and the terrain details being so scarce that I frequently drove off of cliffs because I just could not see anything ahead of me. Still, I remember it running okay on a 133Mhz Cyrix of some sort.

I'm not 100% positive, but he may have had nitro riders. Even if it was nitro riders, I don't know for sure what rendering technique was used on his PC.
I still know this same friend, but I doubt even he still knows what exact version it was. This was before I even got my own PC, so I was always playing at my friends houses and had to make due with whatever they happened to have.

I do still know the stats of that PC reasonably well though as years later it ended up in my collection 🤗

Btw I do remember the terrain looking kinda glitchy a lot.

MMaximus wrote on 2023-01-14, 14:01:

Hi-Octane runs perfectly smooth on a Pentium 90 in 320x200. Now if you want 640x480 that's another story... but it's the same as all the other SVGA games from this era (USNF etc.) - at the time no system was able to run them smoothly.

Yep. I remember playing High Octane, Fatal Racing (a.k.a. Whiplash) and Carmageddon (pre-3dfx) on my Pentium 100 back in the day, wishing I could have the silky smooth frame rate of the 320x200 mode combined with the detailed graphics of the 640x480 mode in those games. Having the best of both worlds on any desktop computer or home console seemed like science fiction to me at the time, available only on high-quality arcade machines, such as Daytona USA.

"Will PCs ever be fast enough to achieve that?", I wondered. I don't remember seeing any software-rendered 3D game (or any fast-paced game for that matter) running at a smooth frame rate at 640x480 resolution on PC until the 3dfx Voodoo cards arrived on the scene, which completely blew any software renderers away. Not only did they offer smooth graphics at 640x480 resolution, they added impressive lighting and texture mapping effects on top of that. I still remember experiencing the magical "wow" experience when I saw those cards in action for the first time. This was truly arcade quality. Game changers in the literal sense.

Pardon the late reply, it's been merciless schedule. In any case...

clueless1 wrote on 2023-01-21, 14:47:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-01-21, 13:58:

clueless1 wrote on 2023-01-21, 12:35:

Yeah, I wasn't very clear with my statement. Sorry. Here's leileilol's quote I was referencing (even though he wasn't talking specifically about System Shock):

Eh, I believe the correct pronoun for leileilol is 'she' 😉 And no, it has nothing to do with wokeness or political correctness or whatever; she is really a woman. 😁

She made an interesting point though. Early SVGA games are a bit crazy, I must say. In Dawn Patrol, you have to endure all the screen calibration processes in order to run the game in SVGA. Also, Matrox Mystique refuses to run the game, despite its chipset is newer than the game itself. Lately I also start playing SypCraft: The Great Game in DOSBOX, and the game refuses to run when I use machine=svga_et4000 parameter. Perhaps the game can only run on S3, or perhaps there is a vague calibration process I need to run before using ET4000 chipset, I don't know.

Funny, I've been on this forum for over 7 years and I had no idea. 🤣

I do recall the days where I'd meticulously set up my CRT geometry for a specific game's SVGA mode only to find that some other game's SVGA mode geometry is now messed up. Or even adjusting the geometry of native DOS command prompt would shift some random game that happened to use the same mode. Can't say I miss that part of the 90's.

CRT geometry? You mean adjusting the width and the height of the screen? I actually prefer old CRTs, because they have analog rotary knobs instead of digital buttons.

I remember adjusting such width and height when playing games that use Matrox Mystique proprietary API; games like MechWarrior 2 and Scorched Planet. Those games run in 640x400, and the height is very compressed despite I had adjusted screen height to maximum at that time, so I had to play with two horizontal black bars above and below the visible area.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-21, 21:39:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-01-21, 08:51:

The intro music sounds very familiar. Are you RetroCompaqGuy?

Nope, not me. I just linked to the video. 😀

Cool and catchy music nonetheless. Love the bass rhyme, especially since my home theater LCR speakers are vintage JBLs with 12 inch woofers! 🤣

vetz wrote on 2023-01-21, 23:22:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-01-21, 21:39:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-01-21, 08:51:

The intro music sounds very familiar. Are you RetroCompaqGuy?

Nope, not me. I just linked to the video. 😀

That would be me 😀 When I made those first videos showing performance differences wasnt my concern, just the visual. If I'd redo any, it would certainly be a topic.

Cybertroopers Virtual-On was released in 1997 for PC with insane system requirements on the box. Recommended P200 (which was one of the top of the line CPUs)

Nice videos! My 3 years old daughter loves the MechWarrior 2 video so much, that I downloaded it to play it locally on the HTPC. "Robot! Robot!" she often exclaims with excitement.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2023-01-29, 16:46:

CRT geometry? You mean adjusting the width and the height of the screen? I actually prefer old CRTs, because they have analog rotary knobs instead of digital buttons.

I liked the screen height and width to be as much to the edges as possible without going off-screen. I also liked straight edges and as close to 90 degrees in each corner as possible. Most monitors that were able to have these sorts of adjustments would also have a memory for those adjustments whenever you'd go back to that resolution. Every once in awhile, there would be two similar resolutions but only one memory for the two, so adjusting one would throw off the other. Back when there were analog rotary knobs, such fine adjustments were generally not possible. There were also times where maxing out the height would not get it all the way to the edge of the border. Sometimes it took changing refresh rates to get more adjustment. That's when software like SDD or Powerstrip came in handy.

Grand prix circuit 2 with svga
Flasback 2 with svga
Syndicate wars with svga

After personal experience with it, i gotta say for the year 2000 it's deus ex.

I tried it on a pentium II running at 500 and a voodoo 3 2000 (it was a subpar build for the game i know) i think i was able to reach 20fps at 800x600

Then i tried it on a pentium III 933 and a geforce 4 TI 4200 and this was the result https://studio.youtube.com/video/SXbXYnyPuZc/edit choppy framerate and lower than expected, thinking about it, the PIII was not able to keep up with it which is a bit ridiculous if you think that the game came out when the PIII was the recommended CPU for it and the GF4 had space to spare for deus ex, i even tried swapping the GF4 for a GF3 ti 200 with different drivers but i got the same result on the same CPU

It became fluid only with my Athlon XP and 9800 XXL and well not shit sir https://studio.youtube.com/video/HjkZVHOJeB4/edit the system is way more powerful than intended for the game.

Then again the game came out in 2000 and the goty version patch came out almost in 2001 so in a way 2001 system with something like a P4 and a geforce 4 is the system to go, but it still baffles me how damn hard it is to get this game to behave on older systems, for me it's definitely the crysis of its time.