Optimus
Junior Member
Posts: 177
Registered: 02-05 |
I think the first time I was playing doom I had a Cyrix 486 and maybe a slow graphics card (Isa maybe?) and I had to play in low detail and sometimes reduced window. I remember seeing doom in some classmates PC which also was a 486 but with a good graphics card (some Vesa local bus) and it was high res and smooth. Wow! So, I realized it must be the graphics card.
I have a 386dx at 40Mhz near me right now. Keeping it for retro stuff. From the whole bunch of old graphics cards I have salvaged, I have tested them all with benchmarks and kept the fastest one, of course it's an ISA card, Tseng Labs ET4000 capable of writting about 85fps to the VGA 320*200*8bpp the fastest way possible. Since Doom seems to be outputing byte after byte and not dword by dword (32bit at once like the benchmark) to the video ram then the most I could expect would not be over 20fps, though even the fastest 386 is not even enough for the engine calculations and rendering. It's still a crawl even after reducing the window. My 386 also has a Gravis Ultrasound btw, first time I have heard the classic doom music using this sound board. It sounds already better than the old adlib sound.
p.s. First day I realized the original doom was outputing one byte at a time instead of doing a 32bit copy was when I tried to replace just for fun the graphics card on a Pentium 3 with some slow ISA card. The old isa card I tried would do 40fps with the benchmarks at most, but you could clearly get no more than 10fps in doom benchmarks. So, since the CPU was already fast enough, I realized the only thing left that affects so badly must be the gfx card. For example, duke nukem 3d at the same stupid configuration was smooth like silk at around 40fps. I made quite a fuzz about it at the time. But of course I later realized, since doom was using ModeX where 4 pixels in a row are not in the same dword but you have to switch pages or something, it wouldn't be easy to copy 32bits at once from the buffer to the video memory. So, I left the case. Thing is, doom is mostly affected by the graphics card speed to write to vram (of course the CPU too, 386 is a no no). Have a Pentium with some slow gfx card and you are fucked :P
p.p.s. My horror was with trying to play Quake (and actually finishing it) in the same 486 Cyrix at 66Mhz. I was even playing without mouse at that period (used from the Doom era).
p.p.p.s. And I just remembered, my 386 is AMD, I have heard somewhere they can be overclocked at 80Mhz, unfortunatelly I have no experience with overclocking and I have to search for some info on the net about that. It would be cool to try doing this and run benchmarks, demos and doom of course.
Last edited by Optimus on 11-20-11 at 12:34
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11-18-11 19:41 
