Doom Frame rates on various systems?

[Weasel Fierce]

I was messing with Doom Attack the other day and it generally gets around 12ish FPS on my 68030, which got me wondering:

Does anyone have (or can get) FPS counts for Doom 1 on any of the following systems (if you get it from an old magazine article thats fine too)

Amiga 68040

Amiga 68060

Mac 68030

Mac 68040

386 class PC

486 class PC

(I realize the latter two encompass a pretty wide range of chips but anything will be a good starting point).
If you are testing this yourself, just boot up E1M1 and check the frame rate as you play normally.


For that matter, does anyone know what the Super nintendo, Playstation 1 and Sega genesis ports of Doom generally ran at?

[Nobby_UK]

Is it not locked to (at best) 35 fps ?

[Weasel Fierce]

Original doom is capped at 35 yeah. Though I suspect some of those systems won't get anywhere near in maximum screen size

[rothers]

It needed around a 66mhz 486 to be full speed all the time. However, it was playable on a 386.

The engine, while absolutely amazing for its time, suffers from the time it was written, there are no easy tweaks to make it faster.

A rewrite of a similar engine today could be far faster, such as Dread (and various other 2.5D engines which came later).

Aside from the switch to BSP Doom does not use many tricks to make it fast, it does the rendering as is.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

Does anyone have (or can get) FPS counts for Doom 1 on any of the following systems (if you get it from an old magazine article thats fine too)

Just type "doom XXX benchmark" in a search engine. It's a rather popular game and been benched to death.


https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/misc/doombench.html
https://www.vogons.org/download/file.php?id=9136
https://thandor.net/benchmark/32

[Weasel Fierce]

Thats very helpful though it seems its harder to find mac (etc) values. I'll have a looksie around.

Thanks though! That pretty much does it all on the PC end.

[Weasel Fierce]

Sniffing around the internet a bit, Ive seen a few people post Amiga 68030/50 frame rates around 8 FPS and about 25 for a 68040

My ACA 68030/56 will hit 10-12 in high detail mode.

Looks like on the PC side, 386's were hitting 8 FPS on a good day, while 486s are a huge amount of variation, but most should exceed 20.

On the console side, some numbers Ive found online seem to be around 10 FPS (SNES with lego graphics), 13ish (Saturn), 20 (Jaguar) and 25-30 (Playstation with a bunch of fancy lighting).


So the Amigas hold up surprisingly okay once you were in comparable degrees of hardware (assuming the rule of thumb that an 030 is roughly comparable to a 386 and an 040 to a 486. Yeah, I know, not very scientific, but close enough for government work).

[coldacid]

If it wasn't for the broken, affine-only texturing in the 3D renderers on Saturn and Playstation, their frame rates would probably been higher. Carmack himself told the devs working on those ports to not use those texture engines because of that. (At least the Nintendo 64 properly took perspective into account in its texture engine.)

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

Original doom is capped at 35 yeah. Though I suspect some of those systems won't get anywhere near in maximum screen size

I’m happy to try this on my ‘060/50 A1200, I think I just need to add -fps to the command line. I imagine it will be near the hypothetical perfect 35FPS, as it totally flies even on full screen/high detail mode. Blew me away what my little A1200 was putting out!

[Seiya]

many years ago, but i remember good. 486SX33 Tseng LAB ET4000 Vesa local bus, Doom take 35 fps.

Blizzard 1230-IV@50 Mhz, about 12/13 fps
Apollo 1240@40 Mhz, about 14/15 fps

[Estrayk]

I dont know about Doom Attack but with ADoom in an Amiga A1200 AGA 68060 / 66Mhz (Blizzard 1260)
between 25 / 33 FPS
[ Show youtube player ]

[dreadnought]

Generally these benchmarks might be a bit misleading, unless it could be confirmed they all had the same details/window size setting.

[Seiya]

of course i played at maxium windows size with status bar visible (weapon, energy and key).

[drHirudo]

Here I show Doom (DoomAttack port) running on classic A1200 machine with Blizzard 1260:

[ Show youtube player ] on PAL Low Res

at 15:50

Here is also Doom running under DOSBox JIT with
DOOM.EXE -timedemo demo3
https://youtube.com/shorts/QIgjt5tTPlk

on AmigaOne X5000. Plus of running it under DOSBox is the MIDI music, not present in DoomAttack

P.S. Hmm. Seems YouTube shorts are not properly embedded on EAB. The forum software needs update. I did this short, just to test EAB forum software for Shorts.

[sokolovic]

To do a proper benchmark recquires maybe the resolution used and thé level of details.

On a 68030 you can get quite few FPS more by downgrading them just a bit. And still having a game very playable on a window larger than Ab3D1 and a better resolution.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Seiya

many years ago, but i remember good. 486SX33 Tseng LAB ET4000 Vesa local bus, Doom take 35 fps.

I think that's a bit off...
From what I remember, and doing some googling, it looks like Doom probably ran about 13-18FPS on a 486SX33...

That still felt pretty impressive at the time...

There a vid on youtube showing that same video card on a 486DX2/66 and it ended up with about 25FPS...
[ Show youtube player ]

[TCD]

This video is quite interesting about that topic: [ Show youtube player ]

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Nobby_UK

Is it not locked to (at best) 35 fps ?

That was the maximum tick rate indeed, and there is little reason to render more often than the game state updates.

Always has been a boggle why that specific number. Perhaps to better support low speed modem connections, since multiplayer support was going to be a feature of Doom right from the beginning. There has to be a specific rocket science reason why it is 35 and not 30.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by gimbal

That was the maximum tick rate indeed, and there is little reason to render more often than the game state updates.

Always has been a boggle why that specific number. Perhaps to better support low speed modem connections, since multiplayer support was going to be a feature of Doom right from the beginning. There has to be a specific rocket science reason why it is 35 and not 30.

IIRC a whole bunch of the original VGA modes ran at 70Hz, which probably explains the 35Hz number.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by roondar

IIRC a whole bunch of the original VGA modes ran at 70Hz, which probably explains the 35Hz number.

You are not wrong:

The value of 35 was not random; it is half the frequency of the VGA mode-Y

Source: https://fabiensanglard.net/b/gebbdoom.pdf page 168