First post, by mmx_91
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Hi!
As I’m quite new in retro computing, I’m curious about some performance issues I’m experiencing since I started playing with these devices some months ago.
After dealing with an old Athlon XP I had stored in my attic (benchmarking graphic cards I had laying around, installing different OS and so on… this is fun!), I decided to recreate my first pc that was based on a Pentium MMX machine.
Luckily, I found 2 Aladdin V chipset boards for cheap that have an AGP slot, so I could use the graphic cards I stored before (basically Geforce 2 and FX models) that, although they are really overkill for such systems, will offer better performance than my S3 Virge I had back then!
So, I built a Pentium machine (oced to 250Mhz with 100 Mhz FSB) with the best of the two boards and a Geforce about 6 months ago and I’ve been playing games (mostly DOS, Tomb Raider II, 3, 4, Need for Speed III, IV, Midtown Madness) since then quite happily, counting the hardware limitations.
But a couple of months ago, I bought a quite standard Voodoo2 12MB, installed it and got very impressed!! Although the image quality is cleaarly worse tan the one from the Geforce (2/FX models, using the popular 43.45 drivers), almost all those games perform twice as fast!! Some examples:
NFS III/IV: No more 3D Control Center compatibility issues, both faster with the Voodoo2
Tomb Raider “classic” series (I-V): Better with the Geforces, but quite close!
Midtown Madness 1/2: quite choppy framerates with the Geforce, smooth with the Voodoo at 640x480 (can’t explain since it’s a DirectX 7 game!!)
International Rally Championship (1997): plays like a slideshow at fast speeds with the Geforce, smooth with the Voodoo.
And obviously the ability to run Glide games now (Descent 1/2 with the Glide renderer looks fantastic) 😉
So, omitting the fact that the Geforce series is faaaar more powerful and faster than the old Voodoo2, what can be happening with this particular setup??
Are these series of games more optimized for their period-correct hardware?
Do Geforce (2-FX) series lack any legacy capabilities, even though they are ‘recommended’ in forums for old Win9x games?
Maybe is a problem of ‘wasting’ the power of the Geforce cards with such a slow cpu that causes this?
I remember playing these kind of games with the Pentium 4 we had back then to replace the MMX original tower, and never had these problems with both a Geforce 2 MX and a FX5600.
Maybe I would buy a Voodoo3 just to test how it performs! Thank you for your comments;)