First post, by foey
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I've become bored with Maxing PCs recently. Whilst it's great seeing your all time fave game run flawlessly there was always a part of me wanting to deal with period correct budget hardware.
Prepare yourself for a splash of 1999 budget hardware.
This would have been a typical off the shelf machine, I've seen a number of examples back in the day in Tiny or Mesh machines in the UK. Socket 7 with no AGP. At the time Intel was the chip to have but came at a premium.
Imagine yourself as a 12-15 year old lad, you only have access to the family machine and you've just started to get into games.
CPU AMD K6-2 450mhz 3Dnow!
RAM 128mb SD-RAM PC100 (Probably would of been 64mb on this machine, I don't have any 64mb sticks) 120mb usable
Motherboard FIC PAG 2130 VIA Apollo MVP4 Chipset @ 100mhz fsb
Graphics Via VT8501 Blade3D graphics accelerator, 8mb Video RAM taken from the system RAM.
Sound Via AC-97 / ISA ES1868 card
Optical DVD-ROM
OS Windows ME
With no AGP in sight, it will be interesting to see how this Integrated solution deals with what we throw at it.
This integrated chipset (Trident Blade3D graphics core) is the last one from VIA designed for Socket 7 CPUs. […]
This integrated chipset (Trident Blade3D graphics core) is the last one from VIA designed for Socket 7 CPUs.
64-bit 2D/3D graphics processor;
From 4 to 8MB frame buffer located in the system memory;
Integrated 24-bit 230MHz RAMDAC;
Peak triangle generation rate - 2.5 mln per second;
Fill rate speed - 110 mln pixels per second;
Anisotropic and trilinear filtering support;
32-bit rendering;
11-level MIP-mapping;
Full anti-aliasing support;
DVD and MPEG-2 hardware acceleration;
API DirectX 6 and OpenGL support.
There is a review on the chipset/Graphics solution here :- http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/d … pollo-mvp4.html
Upon installing Windows ME, I had to source the graphics card drivers - there was no generic driver which supported the chipset out of the box with ME. I installed the latest drivers I could find. These were from 2002. The very sparse options on the re-branded S3 Panel.
First impressions are good, very clear VGA quality and 2D performance in Windows seems decent at first glance.
3DMark 99
All of the tests displayed correctly and quite crisp, there were no textures missing and the initial FPS for the first test was around the 17fps mark. Slightly higher than I expected.
Defaults (800x600) - 1049 3DMarks / 5241 CPU 3DMarks
640x480 - 1279 3DMarks / 5247 CPU 3DMarks
Quake 2
Next up, Quake 2. (Low-Quality Sound) Whilst it was just playable, sub 20fps all textures displayed correctly and colours looked good. It did look very dark and had to ramp up the brightness within the game to get it somewhere where it should be.
OpenGL 640x480 - 18.6fps
OpenGL 680x600 - 14.7fps
Software 640x480 - 15.4fps
Quake 3
Yup, even Quake 3! To be honest, I half expected this not to run. But it did! Textures look OK, Gun textures even a default (Medium) lack detail.
OpenGL 640x480 @ defaults, Timedemo 001 - 10.6fps
Theme Park World
No benchmarking but a typical family game I used to own back in the day. It runs very average, FPS around 18~20fps but is very playable at the start. No doubt it will slow down dramatically with big theme parks. All textures looked correct and present.
Overclocking
I tried to use Powerstrip to overclock the IGP. The default memory clock was 57mhz, no matter I moved the slider to performance remained the same.
Conclusion
We all knew this was never going to be a gaming GPU, however - its compatibility has surprised me. Clear VGA image, OpenGL compatibility. The system is crying out for a Voodoo 2 which would be a nice upgrade for the system. I'll get round to testing some DOS games and compatibility.
Please let me know if you want me to try anything else.
Cyrix Instead Build, 6x86 166+ | 32mb SD | 4mb S3 Virge DX | Creative AWE64 | Win95
ATC-S PIII Tualatin Win9x Build :- ATC-S PIII Coppermine Win9x Build Log [WIP] **Photo Heavy**