I am kind of curious how the glide API fits in with column based renderers, because clearly the world still has the 2.5D representation on the CPU side with vertical shearing effects. Does it treat each column as a pair of triangles and convert the texture co-ordinates?

jh80 wrote on Yesterday, 05:26:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-10-27, 14:25:

I don't get why anyone would put a V3 in anything slow enough to not run Duke at 800x600 well on a 2D card. It only takes a P166 or so and VBE 2.0 card.

While I get the point you're making... I don't think this statement is accurate at all. Can you confirm? Even on a P200 MMX I probably only get 20-30 fps at 800x600 on Duke3d. If you want to play at anything like 60 fps you need a much faster CPU. So, it is possible that someone may have a period-accurate Voodoo 3 in a system that otherwise could not run Duke3d at 60 fps in 800x600.

I am sorry I didn't specify that it didn't meet the arbitrary post year 2000 FPS standard. 1990-1999 if it did 15+ FPS it was playing well.

Anyway, wouldn't be having silly arguments if it was clearly stated what things actually achieve when you release them instead of us having to apply the subtext "Here's a piece of random AI generated crap I am not even sure what it does" because that's what it sounds like when details are withheld.

Edit:Hmmm do code box edits show as edit? because I swear there's more details now in first post than there was.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 12:51:

1990-1999 if it did 15+ FPS it was playing well.

Are you guys aiming for 60 fps on vintage DOS games? On my hyper 486's, I get average 17 fps in Duke Nukem 3D with sound enabled (640x480). It feels good enough for me. My kids can't stop playing it and never said anything about it feeling slow. Neither myself, nor my children, have any experience with modern day action games, so we aren't expecting life-like movement.

My software mode Duke Nukem 3D benchmark results are here, Re: The Ultimate 486 Benchmark Comparison
Anyone know if this Duke3D benchmark will work with the Voodoo3 patch?

TgamesFR wrote on 2026-10-27, 09:33:

For others games i will concentrate maintly on Voodoo 1 exclusives games.
My goal is to make the Voodoo 3 the 100% compatibility card over every 3DFX patches.
And also support few "high-spec" games who need the power of the Voodoo 3 to run correctly (like Duke Nukem 3D and Screamer).

Very interesting, as this happens to be while I still contemplate the merits of whether to keep my Voodoo3 or Voodoo2 SLI.

If you can make EF2000 work on Voodoo3 that will pretty much settle it: I get one more precious PCI slot, and the SLI setup will sell for more anyway.

feipoa wrote on Yesterday, 17:16:

Are you guys aiming for 60 fps on vintage DOS games? On my hyper 486's, I get average 17 fps in Duke Nukem 3D with sound enabled (640x480). It feels good enough for me. My kids can't stop playing it and never said anything about it feeling slow. Neither myself, nor my children, have any experience with modern day action games, so we aren't expecting life-like movement.

My software mode Duke Nukem 3D benchmark results are here, Re: The Ultimate 486 Benchmark Comparison
Anyone know if this Duke3D benchmark will work with the Voodoo3 patch?

As someone who played Duke3d quite a lot on a 486 when it came out, 17 fps is rather unbearable. Did you have your kids compare with 320x200?

Of course people tolerated low fps back in the day. Go back to 1989 and play Mechwarrior and you'll be satisfied with 5 fps.

Once games like Quake and Descent came out, and with online play, there was certainly more discussion about sufficient frame rate. You can read all of this discussion from 1996 still on Usenet. For Duke3d, I see a lot of Usenet comments suggesting 25-3o fps minimum is ideal.

Once 3D hardware started taking off in 1997 and gaming benchmarks started becoming more common alongside sites like Anandtech, then the push for 60 fps really entered the industry consciousness.

But I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a serious Duke3d player from 1996 who preferred 17 fps 640x480 vs. 60 fps 320x200. The game is simply much harder to play at low fps.

jh80, how are you determining your Duke3d framerates? When referring to 60 fps at 640x480, are you able to run the benchmark in the thread I liked previously? It uses a consistent timedemo and takes the average. If you are using the instantaneous frame rates from "dnrate" command, then the numbers are different. For example, when I load LA Meltdown with default settings at 640x480, I tend to see 15 fps as the low and 40 fps as the high (e.g. falling off the building). The normal walking about frame rate is around 21 fps.

Back in the early-mid 90's, an unspoiled kid would have been happy to play at almost any framerate.

feipoa wrote on Today, 01:15:

jh80, how are you determining your Duke3d framerates? When referring to 60 fps at 640x480, are you able to run the benchmark in the thread I liked previously? It uses a consistent timedemo and takes the average. If you are using the instantaneous frame rates from "dnrate" command, then the numbers are different. For example, when I load LA Meltdown with default settings at 640x480, I tend to see 15 fps as the low and 40 fps as the high (e.g. falling off the building). The normal walking about frame rate is around 21 fps.

Back in the early-mid 90's, an unspoiled kid would have been happy to play at almost any framerate.

I haven't measured frame rates in Duke3d in a long time. I was basing my comment on my memories of preferring to play Duke3D at 320x200 on my 486.

"an unspoiled kid would have been happy to play at almost any framerate" -> Yes, but in this case no one is forcing you to play at 17 fps, since you have the option of going to 320x200. I vastly prefer smoother game play over higher resolution. As I said, I think the game becomes more challenging to play at a high level at low fps.

Just so we're clear that people back in 1996 did in fact care about frame rates in Duke3d, here's a snippet of the many Usenet posts you can read about the topic:

https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.s … ndWVscGguY2E%2B

"An optimal framerate is 30 fps or above average... I have seen some posts that claim 12-15 fps is smooth to them, but that is unplayable for me......"

"Since standard television goes at about 24-30 fps (frames per second), if you have a framerate number in that range you are doing good. If we want to talk playability, anything over 15fps is playable."

In the pre-3D accelerator era, it's clear that people's expectations of what "good frame rates" were was much, much lower. The reason being that there simply was no way to attain very high frame rates.

Skip ahead to 1997/1998 and you can read LOTS of people complaining of games "only" running at 40 fps on Voodoo cards (Heavy Gear comes to mind as having lots of complaints on Usenet). The expectations shifted really dramatically in just a year or so.

It isn't clear how you were measuring framerates in Duke3D. Maybe the timedemo I used, which yielded 17 fps at 640x480, would equate to 25 fps in whatever method you used. If we aren't using the same measuring scheme, we are only comparing subjective anecdotes.

On my Cyrix 5x86 system running at 136.5 MHz, I prefer 640x480 with slower framerates compared to 320x200 and faster rates. But there is a limit; 800x600 yielded too slow of a framerate.

There will always be some individuals who demand the fastest results, be it now, or back in 1996. At this time, a large number of individuals still had computers from the early 90's and would have been thrilled if any more modern game ran at all.

BaronSFel001 wrote on Yesterday, 20:01:

TgamesFR wrote on 2026-10-27, 09:33:

For others games i will concentrate maintly on Voodoo 1 exclusives games.
My goal is to make the Voodoo 3 the 100% compatibility card over every 3DFX patches.
And also support few "high-spec" games who need the power of the Voodoo 3 to run correctly (like Duke Nukem 3D and Screamer).

Very interesting, as this happens to be while I still contemplate the merits of whether to keep my Voodoo3 or Voodoo2 SLI.

If you can make EF2000 work on Voodoo3 that will pretty much settle it: I get one more precious PCI slot, and the SLI setup will sell for more anyway.

Yes EF2000 is currently beeing ported to Voodoo 3.

First i will release Battle Arena Toshiden who was also a Voodoo 1 exclusive game then EF2000.

Plans are really make every Voodoo 1/2 patches working on Voodoo 3 and also at same time improve a lot performances compared to V1/V2 lonely.
Like this the Voodoo 3 is the best compatible card.

And bonus few new games... =)
System Shock 3DFX is coming for example...

I know the side effect will be the Voodoo 3 will be even more desirable on the second hand market now xD.

Looking forward to trying this out on my AMD 5x86 rig equipped with a Voodoo3, nice work!