[Pure Modern Rnb Vsti 11
Oludare Padilla
Quake1: Timedemo demo1 If you have blinking screen problem (some Nvidia cards problem), tryvid_nopageflip 1 or vid_wait 0 - console command - all characters has to be lowercase, after command execution you have change resolution to take settings effect [url =709331#p709331] Be aware that vid_nopageflip 1 is saved in game configuration even between game execution, so if want to do "standard" testing you need to set it back to 0 by vid_nopageflip 0 and change resolution
to make it workingDetail explanation how it works[/url] thx FalcoSoft.
Hell ou,
Phil has some nice DOS benchmarks for some PCI and AGP cards, but i wonder about performance on more modern PCIE/ Radeon AGP 3850 / Geforce 520 PCI etc.. cards on system as X58,intel X6X, i865, newest VIA chipsets etc.. but are also pure DOS compatible. I prefer real game test against synthetic benchmarks. Did someone these test?
Discussion / target - which things would be also interesting to discover:
1) which more modern Videocards are glitchless in DOS and which arent (i added any incompatibility note which i met to my Sound cards compatibility testing i can migrate them to special sheet later, i tested lots of games on lots of videocards in process) For now you can usethis matrix for older cards.
2) How more modern videocards which are starting in underclocked speed, until proper speed is initialized by drivers would compared to older cards. . => Some of them performance same or better than older cards.
3) What is exactly 2D performance of more modern card, i saw some Win98 results and because of removing 2D acceleration features some modern graphics card performance was lame.. => Some of them performance same or better than older cards.
4) Discover if DOS videocards speed up utilities are working for modern cards => look at my results, there are very results with and without speed up utility
5) Could Vesa enhancers fix broken default vesa glithces and its possible to make them working on more modern card? Its Univbe thing, i still dont fully understand it, i even used it properly. Even back in era when i used DOS i had cards, which just worked.
6) What is best videocard for Quake 1-1600x1200? => Well 1600x1200 is not supported, Quake ends with 1280x1024.. what is 5:4, so im rather testing 1024.
8) I remember that at some period was possible change videocards frequencies through Bios flashing, wouldnt be possible to change that too slow clocks for default boot for some modern card, to improve their pure DOS performance?
9) If exist some Build engine benchmark i will add it to results..
10) Which is fastest Dos videocard? => If only take to consideration games in our benchmarking suite it would some highend of Radeon HD from 4xxx to 7xxx line, because performance in not based only on raw power, i cant tell for sure, what card would be the best without results, but my guess with that would be HD 7990 - its 375W TDP monster vacuum cleaner.. but i probably some card with 35-50W TDP would have 80-90% of its performance.
Conclusions from my sheets project:
- first of all, graphics enhancers utilities are working with most of cards, at least for some combination of resolution and game - most often with Quake1 (for which is there even additional VID_NOPAGEFLIP 1 speed hack to bypass v-synch shenanigans), less often with Quake 2, much less often for Doom and Doom boost is relatively small, in comparision with them, for Quake they could give you 20! times more performance in some causes, its brutal, almost unheard as i bit shame that such thing in not used by Microsoft and inbuild in MS-DOS nativelly.
- Doom performance on lots of modern, quick cards simply sucks and enhancers are not cure, what is very strange in comparision with old PCI 1-2MB cards, which all are 60 FPS+ for Doom.
- if you dont have fast modern machine, there is performance advantage between real dos machine and Dosbox
- what i dont really understand is that some cards are faster in 1024x768 than with 640x480 in Quake on lots of cards, only conclusion is that Quake or its inbuld vesa drivers are bugged, i dont believe that there is something in chips architectures what cause this - like dynamic overclocking or i thing that almost all modern card are in DOS using its booting minimal idle clock, which are cant be triggered by some DOS code and for better clocks are needed OS drivers. => Update: VID_NOPAGEFLIP 1 is probably cure, more testing needed.. - there could be V-Sync FPS cap with some cards and resolutions, details are here by FalcoSoft
- FalcoSoft about DOS refresh rate and FPS cap: Your monitor's specification does not matter here. Under DOS all SVGA/VESA modes are limited to 60 Hz unless the VESA BIOS supports VESA3 refresh rate setting functions. Unfortunately NVidia disabled these refresh rate settings more than a decade ago (last working versions were Geforce 4 series cards AFAIK and other vendors never supported it). But none of the known games supported VESA 3 refresh rate settings by default. You had to set 60+ Hz refresh rates manually with a special utility - UniRefresh.
- i dont have explanation for X58 Xeon56xx results its much faster cpu and ram than Core 2 Duo systems, 320x200 results is fine, but 640x480 or 1024x768 are very slow regardless of card for PCI. Only problem which i can see is that my machine have poor DOS HDD performance 3 MB/s for integrated Sata controller in IDE, i didnt care because its DOS and its enough for it, but i dunno how is Quake loading texture, is there are loaded before benchmark or there are constantly download and unloading from Storage, because that would means that benchmark is very storage speed depend. I have to try some Ramdisk and compare results (with whole Dosbench on Ramdisk results are still the same, only PC speaker get constant beep when i run benchmark from Ramdrive). I dont have a clue, instructions should be backwards compatible, maybe some problem with some HP O.E.M board implemetation.. but im confused. X56xx card resonable performance only with Matrox Mystique 4 MB and even that, even much faster CPU and memory (DDR3 1333 vs DDR2 667 ) is much slower that slowest Core 2 Duo - 30 vs 57 FPS in 1024x768.
- its seems that number of Stream processors on AMD cards really doesnt matter for DOS, important probably other 2D processing part of chip and its clocks and memory clocks (or lets say its default boot clock which are used for DOS)
- with very fast single thread CPU like 8700K at stock clock, i have with Vmware in every benchmark 100+ FPS, so i looks like winner, that we can throw away old machine, unfortunately Vmware and Virtualbox DOS sound cards drivers suck a lot and FX and FM are not working both together, Vmware pushing other things, so unless someone write own new driver this is now way, way is maybe with other MBs.. pass through some PCI sound card, but i far i know passthrough has only Vmware ESX and its hassle and i dunno it properly working for sound cards.. Even with 8700K is not Dosbox fast enough for max. resolution Dos Q1/Q2 gaming.
- we now have Radeon HD results for 1280x1024 and these cards are really fast also for this results at least in Quake 1, we already knew about 320x200, there are lots of cards with brutal 320x200 Quake 1 performance, but there are quickly lossing performance with resolutions, Radeons HD dont..
- other interesting thing is that Q2 is in general much faster in same resolution than Q1, logic would expect otherwise because Q2 is fully 3D and there are more effect, but Q2 engine could be simply better or Q2DOS has some good speed hacks.
Submit your results and help community:
- you at start of this post how to..
- It would be nice if Phil will add columns for higher resolution to his sheet, but don fear of duplicity, i promise that i would migrate all your results from here to his sheet..
Additional info
- list of DOS games with inbuild FPS counter and how to enable it
- best Windows 98 AGP card thread-- Rayers utility for disable on-chip scaling on nVidia VGA in DOS - its about DVI picture sharpness
- Windows performance of PCI cards up to newest - Youtube video.
- S3 Dos picture too bright problem thread - its VBios ROM problem
Vbios size:
- For most and possible available pure Dos conventional memory is good to have smaller videobios as possible, it a bit problem on modern videocards, especially if UMBPCI is not working with you MB (and its only for realmode, so it will not fix EMS mode) i created thread about that:
here , you can report it too, i added column for it in our sheet too.
Thread about how to measure framerate in DOS games would FPS counter
- its out of scope of my benchmarking, its more work, but it could help to analyze performance in games without inbuild benchmarking tools..
- VGA capture thread 28 pages of info..
- how to capture resolution bellow 640x480 with Aver cards..
My similar threads:
DOS PCI soundcards with modern chipsets. + branched configs and drivers and tools package
DOS Network cards and networking - some modern Gigabit PCI/PCI-E working fine in DOS
PCI Video cards benchmark: Electric Boogaloo Edition - Similar create after this thread
Disclaimer:
As you probably find out, im not good with letters+grammar in every language, i never had brain for that, i was always better with numbers and analytics, sorry. If something in text is not clear, just ask, i will fix it.
Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.
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