What do you get in Final Reality or Turok 1? I have a pretty similar PC, posted some benchmarks for those a while ago.

Will try Final Reality, I'm getting 48 fps on Turok, however my card is running at 60MHz. I'll also try it at 50 tomorrow.

On such a setup it is often the CPU that limits, not the 3d card. At least that was what I saw on Half-Life, the game performed exactly the same (i.e. crappy) when I switched from 640x480 to 320x240. Also 60 MHz is kind of an insane overclock for that card I think. 😀 I wouldn't do this without an extra heatsink.

Here's my results and used config for you to compare: Socket 7 goodness. But 48 FPS in Turok already seems in line with what I got.

Alright, I had some time to play around today. I found out that I had not checked the "Ignore V-Blanks" option in Turok, so at 50MHz I get 48fps and at 60MHz I get 51fps. Probably the CPU is the big bottleneck here.
I will give GLQuake 0.97 a spin next and then try some Final Reality, 3DMark 99 MAX and even a demo of MDK2 (total overkill!!!).

Half-Life on an MMX 233 with a Voodoo 1 is actually quite playable. Of course, when it gets hectic, the framerates drop below playable sometimes, but I think we are just spoiled. I seem to remember that a few years ago it seemed very nice to my eyes 😜. And think of all those people playing FPS games on the N64. Turok 1/2, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark. I'm so spoiled nowadays that I can't even play any of those on a real N64.
So, if we put all this into perspective, back in 1998, this would have been a fairly nice system to play Half-Life on!

Anyhow, my biggest problem with this system is that it just feels sluggish. Yes, Turok passed the test, however would you mind trying Need for Speed II SE and Grim Fandango (of all games!) on your system d1stortion?
I know Grim Fandango should be silky smooth on a Voodoo 1 (it isn't on my system) and also I do remember NFS II SE being very smooth as well. In the level Outback, the sluggishness is especially apparent at the start of the level.
Come on, it couldn't have been that bad!

That is interesting that you find Half-Life playable, on my Socket 7 machine (tried only Uplink btw) it is not, even with a lot of good will. Indoor environments are ok but it drops into the single digits when you get out of the warehouse and look at all of those containers. I don't think 33 MHz and 32 MB RAM less on my machine would make a huge difference, so try some outdoor environments on HL 😀

What OS are you running on this? Can you run some DOS games like Tyrian? Good thing this thread reminded me that I wanted to explore this more. I found the scrolling to be choppier when running the game from 98SE compared to DOS. Don't know if it's the CPU not being able to handle running Windows on top or what...

And yeah I'll look into trying these games you mentioned.

F2bnp wrote:

Alright, I had some time to play around today. I found out that I had not checked the "Ignore V-Blanks" option in Turok, so at 5 […]
Show full quote

Alright, I had some time to play around today. I found out that I had not checked the "Ignore V-Blanks" option in Turok, so at 50MHz I get 48fps and at 60MHz I get 51fps. Probably the CPU is the big bottleneck here.
I will give GLQuake 0.97 a spin next and then try some Final Reality, 3DMark 99 MAX and even a demo of MDK2 (total overkill!!!).

Half-Life on an MMX 233 with a Voodoo 1 is actually quite playable. Of course, when it gets hectic, the framerates drop below playable sometimes, but I think we are just spoiled. I seem to remember that a few years ago it seemed very nice to my eyes 😜. And think of all those people playing FPS games on the N64. Turok 1/2, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark. I'm so spoiled nowadays that I can't even play any of those on a real N64.
So, if we put all this into perspective, back in 1998, this would have been a fairly nice system to play Half-Life on!

Anyhow, my biggest problem with this system is that it just feels sluggish. Yes, Turok passed the test, however would you mind trying Need for Speed II SE and Grim Fandango (of all games!) on your system d1stortion?
I know Grim Fandango should be silky smooth on a Voodoo 1 (it isn't on my system) and also I do remember NFS II SE being very smooth as well. In the level Outback, the sluggishness is especially apparent at the start of the level.
Come on, it couldn't have been that bad!

I remember with Perfect Dark in particular, when things got really hectic the framerate would often drop into the single digits, and the 2 player cooperative mode was practically unplayable on a real system. The combat simulator mode wasn't so demanding though, and I actually think I played a 4 player match of it once at a friend's place without it lagging too badly. PD is probably one of my favorite games ever, though its a shame that it's hard to convince other people to try it due to its framerate issues.

d1stortion wrote:

That is interesting that you find Half-Life playable, on my Socket 7 machine (tried only Uplink btw) it is not, even with a lot of good will. Indoor environments are ok but it drops into the single digits when you get out of the warehouse and look at all of those containers. I don't think 33 MHz and 32 MB RAM less on my machine would make a huge difference, so try some outdoor environments on HL 😀

What OS are you running on this? Can you run some DOS games like Tyrian? Good thing this thread reminded me that I wanted to explore this more. I found the scrolling to be choppier when running the game from 98SE compared to DOS. Don't know if it's the CPU not being able to handle running Windows on top or what...

And yeah I'll look into trying these games you mentioned.

I think the additional 32MB of RAM do help out, definitely a lot less swapping involved! Indoor enviroments on HL are quite ok just as you said. Too bored to reinstall and try Uplink again with outdoor enviroments, but it probably drops to 10 fps or even 6-8 fps at times. Still, given the hardware and timeframe, I think it is actually ok.
Don't get me wrong, I would never, ever play Half-Life or Unreal on such a machine, when I can just install them on my main PC and enjoy them at glorious 1920x1200 with better graphics and constant 60fps 😀. I'm just saying that just because we're spoiled, we shouldn't be so quick to call it unplayable since this was kind of the norm at the time.

I'm running Win95 OSR 2.5, which for some reason does not install IE 4.0 on my copy, so it is quite snappy. I can try some games, heck it is only fair since you offered to try some out too 😁. I'll give Tyrian a try under Windows and DOS, want me to try anything else?

I also tried Final Reality with 22KHz audio and I got 2.51 Reality Marks. Going into a little more detail I got 2.02 marks on 2D image processing, 2.72 marks on 3D Performance and 2.70 marks on Bus Transfer Rate. I should not I'm using a Tseng Labs ET6000, although I will probably just put my Millennium II back in sooner or later.

Moving on to GLQuake 0.97 with MiniGL 1.47 and sound on:
Timedemo demo1: 34.0 fps
Timedemo demo2: 33.9 fps

All of the above were at the default 50MHz Voodoo 1 clock. I decided to glue a heatsink on the main chip the other day and that's why it can handle 60MHz, although Turok 1 locked up after an hour or so (no artifacts though). So the max overclock I'll be doing from now on will be 57 or 58MHz. With that in mind, let's take a look at Final Reality and GLQuake again with those clocks.

Final Reality:

2.45 Reality Marks

2D Image Processing: 1.92
3D Performance: 2.71
Bus transfer rate: 2.60

So apparently Final Reality has great fluctuations in framerates, otherwise I cannot justify this!

GLQuake:

Demo1: 39.3 fps
Demo2: 39.4 fps

GLQuake does far better. Cool stuff, playing around with this hardware. Been some time since I did that. I think the last time I truly played around with this hardware was 4-5 years ago. I even created a thread on some other forum in my country and had people come in and tell some great stories about how they got their first voodoo cards and what their experiences were like. This guy said he had to hide his Voodoo 2 8MB under his coat to hide it from his parents when he got home!
As for me, I got my first Voodoo card in 2008 I think. Playing accelerated versions of Fifa 98, NFS II SE, Quake 1 etc blew me away. The novelty of it wore off finally and I can see through the bullshit, but damn that first experience was simply amazing.

EDIT: I also found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQU_5DgLdb8
My performance seems to be just as bad.

I really ought to try Win95 on mine, but I do enjoy being able to just plug in a USB gamepad with 98SE and play DOS games on that 😀 although this certainly defeats the purpose of slowing it down to 486 speed for some games so DOS is the way to go for them after all. It is just that I have an annoying lack of old peripherals.

Just trying Tyrian is fine. I don't think I have messed with many other DOS games on that rig so far. 😀 Definitely noticed how the scrolling would stutter from time to time (not moving the ship), while in DOS it was all butter smooth.

Just tried the demos for the two games you've mentioned. The NFS game runs great, at least the one track that is in the demo (some tropical level with rain as soon you enter the forest). It only stutters a bit before the start of the race when it loads stuff, otherwise overall smooth and doesn't look too shabby either. But either it's just me or the music quality could be better 🤣

Grim Fandango seems very playable too, it doesn't seem like a game that requires very high frame rates in the first place. The lags mainly come from accessing the HDD, since I can't seem to activate busmaster IDE on this machine.

Only thing that really annoyed me while testing is having to adjust the image position on the monitor for the different games. Hate this.

100% with you on this one, the extra features are a blessing. Not to mention other stuff, like driver installation and how windows open and work in Windows 98SE. However, on such a slow machine, I wanted to eliminate any chance of the OS slowing things down!
Also for some reason, my USB bracket isn't working, it could be the board and I have no idea how to solve it. I will have to pull it out and test it on another machine sometime! So USB is out of the question for the time being, I have to write CDs to transfer stuff, since I don't want to mess with networking and of course floppies are a pain.

Anyway, I tried Tyrian, Tyrian 2000 to be specific. Worked just fine! Pentium level graphics, butter smooth as you say 😁. It even asked me if I wanted to enable Christmas mode hahaha
Cliff from Lazy Game Reviews should show this off in his annual December- Holiday season games.

And as soon as I tried to post this, you posted so let's see what you have to say.
I know of the level you speak of in Need For Speed. It is quite laggy on my system...

Also, I take it you played the full version of Grim Fandango? AFAIK the demo has no 3D acceleration (I played that demo so much as a kid!). Anyway, of course, this being an adventure game, it does not require really high framerates, I think 30 should be more than enough, but I have trouble maintaining even 30 on my machine! I should note that I have DMA enabled.
This is especially noticeable right at the beginning as you pick up the memo and right outside your office, as you approach the secretary.

I should note that I have played this game to death, it is probably my most favorite game ever. That or the very first X-Com. I have a diverse taste in games 😁.

Nope, this was actually the first time I played Grim Fandango, but I knew about it for a long time. Knew someone in 2001 or so that would pester me all the time about how great this game is 🤣 A P200 MMX is still a respectable system for most 1997 and some less demanding 1998 games so it is not entirely unexpected that it runs playable even in software mode (I'd guess anywhere from 15-40 depending on location). NFS I wouldn't call perfect on this machine, it had slowdowns in tunnels or when spinning out, but that track was playable for sure. Goes without saying that a Voodoo5 with FSAA is preferable, we all know that anyway 😁

I have a similar issue with the USB bracket on my GA-586TX3, the left port just doesn't work. Very annoying having to unplug the mouse for using a USB drive! Need to plug in some PCI USB card...

How much cache does your board have? Mine has 512 KB, so if yours has less that could account for a small performance difference.

One game you should try on your machine is Forsaken. I don't think it gets below 40 FPS a lot, and usually runs faster than the monitor's refresh rate (75 Hz in my case, I always turn off VSync). I think the PC version is really well done, and it's even Direct3D!

Ah so you played the demo version on Software Mode eh? Doesn't seem to make too much of a difference in the end, performance is almost equal between the two apparently, D3D just smoothens things thanks to bilinear filtering 😀. Unless you had a Matrox in which case you were fucked hahahaha 🤣
Your description of NFS performance is very close to what I'm experiencing. If so, my memory must be deceiving me and I've just been spoiled by seeing it run on much faster hardware. Voodoo 5 FSAA is nice, but in all honesty I prefer playing this game using nGlide or dgVoodoo and setting a custom resolution, overriding the forced 640x480. And then I can apply AA on top of that, although the V5 does better AA.

I will have to look into the bracket thing! Also, did you need any drivers for the USB mouse? What driver are you using for DOS? I use a classic late 90's and early 00's MS Optical Mouse, but I always have the PS/2 to USB adaptor plugged, since DOS was a problem when using USB mice.

I think my board too has 512KB L2, 64MB cacheable.

I will definitely check out Forsaken, I have it stored somewhere here. I'll install it and post back with my impressions on how it performs on this machine.

I use a generic Logitech "M100". The supplied drivers in 98SE work fine, however it doesn't support the PS/2 protocol apparently, I've had no luck at all getting it to work in DOS. Tried PS/2 adapters, Cutemouse, USB legacy options on my BX board etc... so only my PS/2 keyboard works in DOS, which is one of the main reasons why I play DOS games from Win9x (besides, I played all of them through 95 back in the day anyway so it's authentic for me). And I don't have an oldschool PC gamepad either and a lot of games are simply no fun without a gamepad.

Your system should clear 100 FPS in Forsaken. 😀 Mine did around 90 max in the first level as far as I recall, it ran extremely smooth.

Ah ok then, I'm really thankful that my Optical Mouse supports the PS/2 protocol! As far as game controllers go, I have a couple of gameport ones. I have a Gravis Analog Pro for Wing Commander and a CMS 2 Button, I generally use a USB gamepad. I have a cool little adaptor thingy that allows me to connect my Sega Saturn gamepad on my PC.

Most impressive is another weird controller that I have though. The SpaceOrb 360, Descent fans love this. It is unique I must say, however nothing can beat a good keyboard+mouse combo 😁.

Anyway, yes Forsaken floored me. I had no idea it ran that great on such hardware. Absolutely amazing, hands down. I guess this brings my quest to an end, the verdict being that my memory was flaky and I thought games should have been faster with this hardware. Anyway, it was fun fooling around for a while!
Thanks for the assistance d1stortion!

Ok, so turns out I had connected the USB cable the wrong way. It works perfectly fine now 😁.