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invictius

Does an isa video card put a bottleneck on vanilla?

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I know an 8-bit one drops it down to 15fps, I've finally got a true '93 system, apart from not having a 16 bit isa card - I'm using a pci. Was it ever possible to run doom at full frames with a 16 bit isa?

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The question has an interesting extension: an ISA videocard's bandwidth does put a limit on the maximum theoretical framerate when playing back demos with the -timedemo parameter.

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/73471-fastest-vanilla-doom-shareware-timedemo-youve-ever-seen/

If you observe the results in the famous Doom benchmark results page, you'll see that vanilla Doom, regardless of CPU power, seems to top off at 200-something fps, even if the CPUs used are up to a hunded times faster than what would be required to obtain 35 constant fps in vanilla doom. Any figure significantly higher than 200 fps was obtained with a source port and/or under a different OS/runtime environment (e.g. a VM). The theoretical max, for an pure ISA video card, with all timings accurate, would be about 260 fps. Using PCI or AGP video cards in DOS mode doesn't seem to be able to "break" this barrier, not even close.

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