Doom Frame rates on various systems?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by desiv

Based on the youtube vids posted in this thread of Doom playing on 486 class machines, I think that is more of that rose colored glasses specs. (I'm guilty of that myself. More than a few times I go back to see a game I loved and it runs slower than I remember.)

A 486DX33 with a fast VLB card would be around 15/16 FPS... and an SX25 slower still...

Perhaps you are right. I only remember that it was much smoother on the 486SX-25 than my 386DX-40 with ISA bus VGA card.

On my A1200 with 50MHz 030 25 fps feels very smooth, but of course to get that I have to run it in a small window. Normally I run it 2 sizes down with low detail and get 11-20 fps (~15 fps on average), which is plenty fast enough and a satisfactory window size for me.

A 386DX-40 should get similar results to my A1200, and a 486 would be faster so with those settings 20-25 fps seems believable.

[TjLaZer]

It is capped at 35 fps. If you do run it in higher resolutions you can benefit on faster processors. I get ~11 at 640x400 on Vampire A1200. Of course 35 fps at 320x200 & on the 060/50+ the same. Not quite as high at 640x400 but close.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Some Oak cards were better than others. In this test of Quake in 320x240 on an Athlon XP2200+, an OTI 037C only got 9.2fps, slightly ahead of a Trident 8800 at 8.7fps and behind a Trident 8900B at 11.5fps. However an OTI 067 got 21fps, and an OTI 077 got 26.8fps. The fastest ISA cards (surprisingly including a Trident 8900CL) got 36fps.

I don't know how fast my 25MHz 486SX was, only that it played Doom very smoothly so I'm guessing it was around 20-25fps.

Certainly would not be with an ISA bus card.

His 386 was ISA as he bought it in summer 1992, VESA Local Bus was pretty much 486 only in 1992 and pretty top end in the UK. Another friend of mine got a 33mhz 486 when I got my 25mhz 486 around Autumn 1992 and it did have VLB motherboard and I think a TSENG labs card so it was better at Doom. We both got a Gateway PC later in 1995 and he got the 133mhz and I got the 120mhz version of the exact same PC hence I know you need more than 120mhz to play Super Stardust on PC with zero frame drops but 133mhz is fine.

My 486 wasn't bad considering it was the cheapest money could buy at the time, it did about 22FPS for F1GP and Actua Soccer was fine on it too. It just wasn't quite enough for smooth 2D scrolling games the A1000 didn't even break a sweat doing. At some point I bought a Gravis Ultrasound for it and a CD-ROM. Still have the Gravis actually.

I had quite a few PCs over the years, my fav' was a Packard Bell iXtreme which had an Athlon XP3000 or better CPU and it looked like something out of the movie 2001 with that cool curved white plastic case and touch sensitive DVD ROM tray eject buttons. Of all the PCs I have ever owned that was the nicest, the fan was near silent so great for watching movies on the TV via the ATI Radeon 9000 card with composite video output. Also had 5.1 audio output. I miss that PC. The only bad side was I had to use Windows on it.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

His 386 was ISA as he bought it in summer 1992, VESA Local Bus was pretty much 486 only in 1992 and pretty top end in the UK.

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I can't remember if this was when my friend had found a cheap VESA Local Bus 386 motherboard though or if this was using his ISA motherboard from 1992.

I guess your memory got better.

VL bus 386 boards were available in 1992, but if you say he only had ISA then we have to believe you. All I can say is that every benchmark I have seen puts a 386DX-40 with ISA card (even the ET4000 in my post above) at less than 10fps. Of course this is with standard settings (full window with hud, high detail).

We both got a Gateway PC later in 1995 and he got the 133mhz and I got the 120mhz version of the exact same PC hence I know you need more than 120mhz to play Super Stardust on PC with zero frame drops but 133mhz is fine.

That agrees with my own experience. 3D games are generally fine because the frame rate can vary quite a bit without being noticeable. Smooth scrolling 2D games are more picky. Shearing was a common problem on PCs when the frame rate wasn't synchronized. Some cards didn't even have a vsync signal, which made frame sync impossible. I notice the same thing in YouTube videos - a game that is perfectly smooth on real Amiga hardware looks choppy in the video.

The other thing most people don't talk about is how jerky and inaccurate a PC mouse was/is. Most VGA cards didn't have a hardware pointer so it had to be rendered in software. It would often flicker while the screen was updating, and sometimes leave 'mouse droppings' on the screen. The ET4000 was infamous for this if you used the standard VGA driver.

Even on my 'modern' PCs I have difficulty getting the mouse movement right. On this Linux box the 'acceleration' was way too fast and I had to type a command in to reduce it. Sometimes the mouse freezes up when the machine is heavily loaded with virtual memory - which can take 20 minutes or more to clear!

In comparison, even a slow old A500's mouse pointer is rock solid and accurately controllable. This is very important when eg. trying to draw stuff in a paint program.