First post, by OpenRift
So here's the situation: I currently have a 450Mhz Pentium III in my Windows 98 rig. It can handle DOS/software-rendered games and most 3D-accelerated stuff (97-99) pretty decent paired with my registry-unlocked 3dfx Velocity 100, however, there are some games where things start to chug. The first game I noticed the slowdown was Quake III (v1.32), where the "four" demo gives me about 35 or so FPS. It's fine for a good chunk of the game, but once you go onto some of the bigger maps (i.e. Q3DM12), FPS can dip somewhere in the teens. Trying to push it further, I started trying some games from 2000/2001, just to see how those handled. No One Lives Forever (GOTY Edition) was chugging HARD, getting what felt like 5-20ish FPS in a mostly static scene. Rune Gold handled a bit better, but once you got a look at any relatively open spaces, it went back to sub-20FPS (and some weird graphical issues after the initial underwater cutscene, but I digress). Half-Life (v1.0.1.6) was also performing rather disappointingly as well, for some reason. These were all played at 640x480, by the way.
My PC is a Dell Dimension XPS T450. Based on the research I've done, the motherboard should be able to handle up to a 1Ghz PIII, as long as it's using a 100Mhz bus (which is a bit uncommon for 1Ghz). Of course, prices on ebay aren't that great for 1Ghz, same going for some 800 or 850Mhz listings.
With all that being said, what would be a good clock speed that can get these turn-of-the-millennium games in a more consistently playable place (30-40fps average) at 640x480? Is the 8MB VRAM of my Velocity 100 going to be too much of a bottleneck for these games?
To reiterate, these are the kind of games I'm hoping to get running at 640x480, targeting 30-40fps average:
- Quake III
- No One Lives Forever
- Rune
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- Red Faction 1
- Deus Ex