First post, by Maraakate
- Rank
- Oldbie
Recently, I've been on a mini-mission here to run all sorts of benchmarks and trying various combos testing against windows with the opengl icd, wickedgl and mesa dll drivers all compared to q2dos with mesa.
The computer I'm testing all of this on is a slot 1 p3 800mhz, overclocked to ~900mhz. This is very similar to the official test machine 3dfx used for the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP according to http://www.falconfly.de/downloads/3dfx-v5-PC- … ewers-Guide.zip. I am using AmigaMerlin's 2.9 driver.
Something very interesting occurred during testing. I found out by accident that multitexturing in high res modes is much faster when I ran glquake (glquake by default checks for multitexturing and has to be explicitly disabled with -nomtex otherwise) compared to QDOS with Mesa (resolutions 1280x1024 and 1600x1200). I reenabled the multitexturing code in QDOS and added to check for ARB multitexturing in GLQuake and fallback to checking for SGIS. 3dfx OpenGL ICD uses SGIS, but Mesa and WickedGL use ARB. After that was all set in place I found the same results across the board!
I took it a step further, tried it on Q2DOS and found out the same thing. Now, it only helps 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. 1024x768 and lower suffer substantially, and this effect is mirrored in all the windows drivers I tested is well.
Later on, I tested 32bpp modes with and without multitexturing enabled and found they perform much faster with multitexturing on at 1024x768 and higher. Lower resolution will suffer with multitexturing on and 32bpp.
So for those of you out there with P3 machines and a Voodoo 5 5500 it might be worth testing out multitexturing at 1280x1024 to be able to play it in high res modes at comfortable frame rates (it will still dip to 40-50 sometimes in more complex scenes, but for the most part is playable at least on my setup).
