AzzKickr
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I'll be back
Posts: 70
Belgium-Europe
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Okay, I finally have the performance I wanted. A brief guide to what I went through the last week(s):
So my V5 equipped retro rig has a dual boot system with Win98SE on one hand and XP SP3 on the other. On the Win98 system I installed latest available official 3Dfx drivers and had no issues whatsoever, as expected. Games are fast, stable and good looking. I took UT99 with all patches as a benchmark for Glide performance and Q3 without any patches for OpenGL performance. On this system I’m doing 68fps in UTBench in 1024x768x16 Glide, highest quality settings in the menu. Quake 3 does a steady 73fps in 1024x768x32, again highest image quality settings.
Note that I don’t tend to play newer titles on this machine, all games from around the V5 era en perhaps 1, max 2 years later. So no need for DX9 or new games compatibility.
On the XP SP3 system I have been struggling since the beginning. I started out with SFFT 1.6’s. UT (Glide) was doing good with the same results as the Win98 system, 68fps average in UTBench. In Quake 3 however I was not able to go beyond 60fps, and exactly 60fps. As the refresh rate for my Hercules Proview 720 lcd is 60hz, I started to look at the VSync controls. Disabled everything, but still no luck in getting more than 60fps in the benches, although the framerate counter clearly goes higher during the tests.
Then I switched to all sorts of drivers, ranging from X-3Dfx to AmigaMerlin, to others, … no success. Some drivers were even a lot worse with a mere 40fps in the Q3 benchmark. Others simply crashed. That’s when I started to get frustrated and started to mix drivers. With all of this mixing and installing, removing, reinstalling, tweaking, I seemed to have broken the Glide performance as well as suddenly UT was doing bad as well.
So I started to log my changes and what I mixed and where. I got in the situation where UT was going good, and Q3 bad, or the other way around. I never got to the point where both of the games were going the way they should.
AAARGH !!!
So, removed everything 3Dfx related, cleaned the registry and removed all 3Dfx related driver components. Then I took one of the very first community modded XP drivers, found in Falconfly’s archive, named “Voodoo XP Alpha 1.06” . As the 3Dfx tools in this package didn’t work, not even when doing the famous “repair” option the 2nd time, I installed the 3Dfx tools from the SFFT package as they install without a problem. So the current mix was this early alpha XP driver and the working 3Dfx tools.
Q3 was doing real good, pushing 77fps in the benchmark, better than the Win98 system ! Yay ! But then UT was, again, doing really bad, with only 55fps in UTBench. So I went to look for some other Glide files and went for Koolsmoky’s library’s: SUCCES !! UT went from the crippling 55fps to 68fps and Quake 3 is still doing big 77fps numbers !
Then I installed a Wicked3D OpenGL driver for max Q3 acceleration and as a result I’m pushing over 80fps in the Q3 benchmark, highest image quality settings in both the game as the 3Dfx tools, apart from FSAA.
So I finally have the performance I want in both old-skool shooters and assume other titles from the same era will run good as well, only time will tell.
I’m happy now with big thanks to the community for the modded drivers and Koolsmoky for the excellent Glide files !
Still 1 side note to make: I still don’t understand how Q3 can go faster in 32bits in OpenGL than Unreal Tournament in 16 bits Glide ? I would expect it to be the other way around, or is the Q3 engine really THAT good …
I’m going to look into it further, perhaps texture compression has something to do with it. Or some other setting I overlooked in the unrealtournament.ini file.
Azz, signing off for now.
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