You could try a faster CPU.

http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-MSI/Ms-6368.html

Your board supports all Tualatins.
The 1400 mhz CPUs are not officially supported but I am sure they will work anyhow.
A Celeron 1300 should cost less than $10 including shipping and is easy to find on Ebay.
If you find a cheap PIII-S 1.26 even better.

Here is a Tualatin PIII-S 1.26. $15 including shipping world wide.
I am sure there are even cheaper ones.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pentium-3-III-S-1266- … =item35d19ebf15

sliderider wrote:

And aren't there also backward compatibility issues with new cards trying to run old games anyway? A DX11 video card is going to lack features present in a DX5 or DX6 video card simply because those features are no longer needed because newer functions added to later cards have rendered those features obsolete. Why continue to support something that programmers aren't going to use anymore, right?

Yeah, that is why I'm not fond at all of using such a new card. You could well enough just run those games on whatever modern PC and get pretty much the same compatibiity, only with faster performance.

d1stortion wrote:

I really think putting such a new card in a P3 makes for a bizarre combination... my guess is that the drivers expect SSE3 as that is the lowest common denominator for quite some time (or just a lot more general CPU performance than what your P3 offers), which may be why you are getting such bad frame rates even in old games like Deus Ex. It's not a completely fair comparison obviously, but still worth mentioning that Xbox had a 733 MHz P3/Celeron hybrid with a GF3 and that played 2004 games like HL2 and Doom3 well enough.

Getting a 3dfx card or at least something up to Geforce FX would make a lot more sense for such a PC if you are talking about compatibility...

@d1stortion, i too was surprised when i came across the fact that original xbox with low hardware specs could play hl2. it shows how a specifically written driver can make or break the gameplay. when i was buying this card, i was even secretly hoping to play hl2 albeit at low settings. now look where i'm, still babbling about gameplay in hl1. you might be correct about sse3 or even sse2 atleast, in which case i don't have any option. however if it is due to pci bridge bursting issues, i will keep my fingers crossed for a workaround. so i request anyone with a via chipset and a pci graphics card to share the results and the pci dump for which i will be very much grateful.

@sliderider, i completely agree with you. i purchased the complete half-life pack from steam. i can make a point that since the source engine is updated by steam the rendering also may make use of modern features in which case my modern graphics card should not have much problems. in fact, i get more maximum fps in hl1 from source engine than from goldsrc engine. however in some scenes the source engine creates new problems. another observation i have is some games really perform poorly like deus ex, expendable(avg. 30 fps) and the starting cutscene from NFS:MW plays at 11 fps. these are the clues i'm concentrating on to single out the issue.

@Skyscraper, thanks for taking your time. but my mainboard is ver 2.0 and not 5.0(which support Tualatins) that is displayed in the msi website. i also came across a pin mod that probably can accomodate a Tualatin, but i want to be sure that the problem is not due to driver or chipset before i go down the cpu upgrade path.

Well, AGP quirks on VIA chipsets are known well enough, but PCI too? Sound cards can have PCI bus latency/contention issues, but I haven't heard about issues with video cards. Fair enough, a PCIe to PCI bridge is a special case.

I wonder if the PCI slot version could be of relevance? The card would be PCI 3.0 I guess, while your board would presumably only support PCI 2.2.

A sort of similar case to what you are doing, you can see how badly Quake 3 runs on a dual PPro 200 1MB+8400GS setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK5QFySGpy4. The game itself is not SSE optimized, and I'm not sure how much MMX would do for it.

gandhig wrote:

@Skyscraper, thanks for taking your time. but my mainboard is ver 2.0 and not 5.0(which support Tualatins) that is displayed in the msi website. i also came across a pin mod that probably can accomodate a Tualatin, but i want to be sure that the problem is not due to driver or chipset before i go down the cpu upgrade path.

Ah missed that only rev 5 could handle the Tualatins.
A Coppermine 1000 is a CPU that at least around here can be had for $1 + $2 shipping.
Not a huge upgrade but the price makes it worth giving it a try to see if anything gets better.
133 mhz fsb makes more difference than one would believe.

I am very confident that a pin modded Tualatin would work.
If you do not want to do the mod your self the price gets higher and I can understand that you are looking for other options first.

hi skyscraper, i overclocked mine to 950 MHz@112 fsb and still only got a increase of few fps. definitely tualatin will be a huge improvement. yeah the 100 fsb sucks!!another thing is my memory is pc133 cl3, not cl2 and i run it asynchronously. tried sync operation too, but finally settled with the current one. i have attached my aida bench reports with 100 and 112 fsb.

@d1stortion, i get an avg of 115 fps in Q3Arena demo001 at Normal settings except i set to vertex instead of lightmap(considerable hit). difference in pci ver 3.0 vs 2.2 - interesting!

Just so you know, not all AGP systems are better. I just let the test run while I was off eating dinner, and got 2384 3dmarks in 3dmark 2001se, on my "EpoX-AMD" system. AMD AthlonXP Palomino @ 1952 Mhz, PC-150 ram, and a Voodoo3 3000 AGP card on KT133 chipset. I don't know if it matters but the test was also run under Windows 98 SE.

My system there isn't really built for Direct3D / DirectX gaming performance though, it's more for high performance in DOS GLIDE games, and other very early Win9x GLIDE games.

@kithylin, I will take that as an encouragement/motivation for me to progress further in atleast identifying the cause.

I booted up and ran my other computer through the same test to give you an idea of what a mid-range AGP system would be like and give you an idea where your system's performance is compared to my slower one, and my faster one.

Dell Dimension 8300
2.8 Ghz P4 northwood HT (socket 478)
dual-channel DDR-400
AGP 8x
nvidia GeForce 6800 ultra
windows vista x86 / 32-bit

11,513 3D Marks in 2001se

This system can run half-life 2 @ everything set to maximum @ 1024x768 at around 55 - 70 FPS

@kithylin, thanks for your time to benchmark. but i only want to play hl1 and such games which has a very low cpu requirement than my present system. even if i'm unable to game with my mismatched hardware, i only want to identify the exact cause. if you have pci graphics card, please share your benchmarks.

No.. I don't have any 3D accelerated PCI cards, sadly, only 2D ones. Over here in USA, older AGP systems are so very cheap (I got the entire dell machine listed above free, except I bought the video card myself), and most of the Non-AGP systems are so slow they couldn't do 3D-Accelerated stuff without AGP so, I never really bothered, personally. Sorry on that 😒

Ive played Jedi Knight 2 on a PCI Radeon SDR. It ran pretty well but you could instantly tell if the system swapped textures to system RAM. PCI is far too slow for that and speed reduced to a slideshow. With 32MB RAM on that PCI Radeon, JK2 had to be kept at lower settings.

Deus Ex, Half Life and other games of that complexity should run very well on a PCI video card like that GeForce 520. Something else is wrong. Indeed maybe a problem with the PCIe bridge chip and the old PCI bus on that board. Or drivers not designed for such an old platform.

With Deus Ex, I suggest trying UTGLR (the build for Deus Ex). It is far better than stock D3D.

@swaaye, i tried the alternative renderers "dxd3d9r13.zip" & "dxglr20.zip" (mentioned for DeusEx in the website)earlier and definitely observed improvement compared to the default renderers that came with the steam version of the game. the original opengl renderer was better than original direct3d.
so when i used the alternative direct3d9 renderer, it was better than that of opengl, if not equal. but the minimum fps in the opening dock scene didn't cross 15 fps. i didn't try the "utglr36.zip" as i thought it was specific to unreal tournament. do you suggest using this one for deus ex?

just wanted to update that i contacted nvidia(was thinking crazy!) with a specific question "whether their graphics card have a minimum cpu requirement and specifically whether their drivers are optimized for SSE2 and such other optimizations to enhance performance in new systems(understandably)?". their revert was very quick. but as expected, they washed off their hands saying that they don't approve the pci to pci-e reverse bridge onboard the gpu, however i can play with it if it works and that the poor performance might be due to old hardware. this was even after i explained to them that the games i try to play are also very old classics. by the way they were even trying to make me understand what FPS is. i guess most of the unsuspecting user's questions get dropped into their dust bin at the customer help desk itself. so much for my 0.1% hope that it will probably reach their driver department.

i have some more stories to say later, hope i'm not bothering or boring most of you.

It's not boring to at least one of us (me) I'm still curious about your situation and reading each update. 😀

Get this for Deus Ex: http://www.cwdohnal.com/utglr/dxglr20.zip

@kithylin, thanks for your kind reply.

@d1stortion, i already tried that. please see my previous post.

i will try to summarize shortly my observations, possible reasons, possible workaround and their pros and cons. recently i came across somewhat similar case from 2006 (except for the pci to pci-e bridge, probably zotac should advertise that the card is not meant for injecting life into P3 class and old hardware) in viaarena forums when i searched for "ple133 chipset". following are the threads for the same case in sequence:

http://www.viaarena.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25338

http://www.viaarena.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25465

http://www.viaarena.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25485

what is missing is how "a hour session of half life" played out as the OP mentions in the last thread after he implemented the steps advised by senior member 'rupert penjab'

Maybe contact Zotac and ask them about the specifics of that PCI bridge chip, i.e. slot version? Frankly PCI video cards like that are actually intended for old computers (as a replacement for onboard and such), everything else wouldn't make much sense... though I don't think they'd advertise it as a gaming card.

d1stortion wrote:

Maybe contact Zotac and ask them about the specifics of that PCI bridge chip, i.e. slot version? Frankly PCI video cards like that are actually intended for old computers (as a replacement for onboard and such), everything else wouldn't make much sense... though I don't think they'd advertise it as a gaming card.

i did that when i found out that it was not getting automatically detected by my mainboard (mar'13). their support was not better and asked me to return to seller for refund if the product was not found satisfactory, which i didn't do. during that period i used to boot into DOS, set the memory ranges of the graphic's card manually through a pci config tool and let the windows do the rest. i was getting poor performance (like i get now) and assumed that the problem is due to my manual tweaking. so i set out on disassembling my bios(with support from bios modding experts like pinczakko, ruelnov from other forums) to patch it. this i succeeded, but came back to square one in the performance front.

i left out a thing in my previous post. Zotac support informed me that they don't have a socket 370 system and hence they can't simulate and test it. i once again request anyone with a via chipset motherboard and a pci graphics card to share some benchmarks and pci regs dump.

maybe, i will contact pericom (the pci to pci-e bridge vendor) regarding the suspected compatibility issues between the bridge and via chipset. but i doubt i will get any help, can't blame them really and i won't.