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Quake won't run on 486-100, is it just me?

Alright I'll give the onboard and then the STB a shot, see which one runs Quake more bearably - lol. I'll let you guys know when I do so, for the records.

I'm not running Windows on this box, so if I could find a Tseng that'd be fine - but I don't have one.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if the video card has little bearing on a 486's Quake performance. We're talking 320x200 here. The bottleneck will be the CPU and memory performance, I think.
 
Well if that's the case then my MediaGX that's coming soon should have the best shot at running it that any 486 (barring the Pentium Overdrive) has at it, due to it's slightly superior FPU and the FPU's importance in 3d math.

The integrated sound and video should provide a benefit as well, being tied directly into the CPU might increase video throughput, making it a bit lighter on the system.
 
Raven said:
Well if that's the case then my MediaGX that's coming soon should have the best shot at running it that any 486 (barring the Pentium Overdrive) has at it, due to it's slightly superior FPU and the FPU's importance in 3d math.

The integrated sound and video should provide a benefit as well, being tied directly into the CPU might increase video throughput, making it a bit lighter on the system.
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I've run some tests on the Intel 486, Am5x86 and Cx5x86 CPUs. I have a end-of-the-line 486 mobo with PCI and it supports all CPUs. The results showed that Cyrix 5x86 is indeed a bit faster at the same clock for FPU. At 120 MHz it is a good bit faster than a Am5x86 160MHz FPU. However, the 160 MHz Am5x86 is the fastest chip for everything else.

I also tested the weird Pentium Overdrive for Socket 3. ;) The one I had would do 100 MHz and it just dusts everything else when it comes to floating point. That CPU really is a curiosity with its Pentium core on a 486 interface and with the same 32KB total L1 cache size as a Pentium MMX! But it has compatibility problems with just about every motherboard. On my test board the L2 cache wouldn't work with it. The L2 was enabled but it seemed to be bypassed somehow because it didn't show up in any memory tests. As a result, while PODP is super fast for FPU calculations, its memory and integer performance lag behind the Am5x86 160 and the system felt somewhat sluggish.

I put a Voodoo3 in that system to test 3D game performance and used Jedi Knight as my test subject. By using the Voodoo3, I kept the 3D card from being a bottleneck and the CPU had no time to rest. The Pentium Overdrive @ 100 was the clear winner. The 160 MHz Am5x86 and 120 MHz Cx5x86 produced similar results as I recall (hard to tell them apart).
 
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Just out of curiosity, you do have the original version right? Not one of the enhanced/rerrendered graphic versions? I don't quite remember when Quake came out but I think I was on a pentium system by then though I remember games like Terminal Velocity had options of 486 or pentium depending on your system specs. My comment is just that if the pentium was more common when the game came out (yeah I know I should look it up) it may haven't really been meant for 486 playability in full screen mode.
 
If you go read about the inner workings of the Quake engine, it becomes very clear that the Pentium was the intended target for it. It is heavily optimized for Pentium's parallel execution capabilities (more than one instruction per clock). It also works specifically around instruction latencies on Pentium, neglecting other chips and hurting their performance in the process. Quake is a Pentium / Pentium Pro engine.

The 486 simply isn't really capable of this level of 3D world complexity and that's why they didn't spend the many man hours trying to tweak it to the limit. With a 486, programmers usually stayed clear of the FPU because it is slower than going straight integer. But there was a lot of anger when Quake came out and people discovered that 486/5x86/K5/6x86/K6 are well behind a Pentium per clock with Quake. The fact of the matter is that Pentium was superior for 3D rendering and it sold better, so it got attention from id while the other CPUs did not.

Apparently P6 (PPro) works enough like Pentium that the optimizations work on it too because that CPU was a Quake monster. Could also just be the FPU improvements and ultra fast cache coming into play.
 
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I wouldn't be surprised if the video card has little bearing on a 486's Quake performance. We're talking 320x200 here. The bottleneck will be the CPU and memory performance, I think.
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Normally that's true, but when a significant amount of CPU time is being dedicated to drawing stuff on screen (which was a typical trait of Trident cards), then the CPU bottleneck is going to be that much worse.
 
barythrin said:
Just out of curiosity, you do have the original version right? Not one of the enhanced/rerrendered graphic versions? I don't quite remember when Quake came out but I think I was on a pentium system by then though I remember games like Terminal Velocity had options of 486 or pentium depending on your system specs. My comment is just that if the pentium was more common when the game came out (yeah I know I should look it up) it may haven't really been meant for 486 playability in full screen mode.
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I have v1.06, which came from Steam - original graphics and game, etc. - but 1.06 patchlevel. The newest I think is 1.09, dunno why they distribute an older one.

The Pentium Overdrive is a cool chip, and I'd like to get one, but the Cyrix 5x86 is the most powerful 486-esque design (I realize it's a redesign) without just being a Pentium crammed into a 486 socket - that's why I'm going with the Cyrix MediaGX. It's a Cyrix 5x86 at it's fastest - 133mhz - with SB and VGA built-in.

Thanks for doing those benchmarks, btw, swaaye - did you record the framerates? If so, can you post them? If not, were the Am5x86@160mhz and/or the Cyrix@120mhz playable (at least 10fps, preferably 15+)?
 
Raven said:
Thanks for doing those benchmarks, btw, swaaye - did you record the framerates? If so, can you post them? If not, were the Am5x86@160mhz and/or the Cyrix@120mhz playable (at least 10fps, preferably 15+)?
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I did those tests years ago and I don't think I actually recorded the numbers. You can see some 5x86 results in this link. 15fps is probably the best you can hope for. The Cyrix 6x86 isn't exactly a barn burner either and is surely faster than 5x86.
http://web.archive.org/web/19961223112037/www.cam.org/~agena/quake.html

Remember that while Cx5x86 is more advanced than Am5x86, it can't clock as high. When you put a Am5x86 at 40x4, that's one speedy 486 and I think is the Cx 120's match overall.
 
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Well in my ValuePoint my Am5x86 could only get up to 101mhz, and in other boxes I was running it at 133mhz stock. The Cyrix will be 133mhz as well, so I expect a bit more push out of it than any 486 I've experienced before, at least for floating point.
 
Yup that bit of extra clock speed will help, but :D. Let me know how it goes!

I think that machine will be a good box for older stuff as long as the audio has good SB compatibility and the video's VESA support is decent.
 
The VESA is supposed to do all VESA modes up to 1280x1024x8 and 1024x768x16, so I think that'll be fine. As for the SB, I've read in some lawsuit papers from Creative about the marketing of the MediaGX that it's not 100% compatible, but it's like 2% of games that won't work, so I'm sure it'll do fine for my needs. The only worry I have is that the MPU-401 support for MIDI is disabled by default in Compaq units, purportedly, so I'll either have to look at enabling that, or hope my games don't use MIDI (I don't think they do, they all use FM Synth and Digitized sound afaik). However, it's also supposed to support hardware MIDI, so there should be a header for that and I have a daughterboard hooked up to one of my soundcards, maybe it's compatible - but if not, I can buy one.

I also read that the chipset has an ISA and PCI bus, meaning that if I get super-adventurous, I can figure out how to make an adapter for an expansion chassis and wire up a few PCI and/or ISA slots and solve any issues that I might have with compatibility. ;D

The idea is really not to screw with the system though, so I'd rather avoid that unless purely for fun.
 
So, I know this post is ancient - but I wanted to report about how I was recently using a 486DX4/100 setup when using an ISA 16-bit VGA (a 1994 Diamond SpeedStar 64), and concur that Quake wasn't running very well (CF emulated IDE drive and SB16 audio). But the mainboard I am using has 3x 16-bit ISA slots and 3x PCI slots. I swapped over to a PCI video card (1995 STB Systems S3) - I can't recall what the RAM differences between these cards is - but it's night and day difference on this same 486DX4/100 processor.

I tried Quake on an old 386DX/33 - and it actually did run, but like various videos report, it was near 1-2 FPS. With the ISA Speedstar 64 on this 486DX4/100, it was definitely still single digit FPS - I don't know a hotkey or exact way to get Quake to report a rate- but I'd say in the 5-7 FPS territory (even at like half screen). Swapping to the PCI card seems to have tripled that - it's not blazingly fast, but even at full screen it feels about 14-17 fps and reasonably playable.

Here's the two cards I tried. If you're trying Quake on a 486, seek out at least a PCI video card.


1750975519196.png
 
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Yeah.

I've originally beat Quake in 1997 on Pentium 100 with S3 Trio 1MB and no soundcard and it was pretty smooth sailing for todays standards. 486 guys struggled but it wasn't unplayable.

Btw never understood 486 gaming in this age. A lot of best DOS titles do not run optimally on anything bar fastest 486s. Obviously SVGA in demanding games is a no go. Obviously everything struggles more if you run 16-bit sound and MIDI. And archaic DOS games won't work on 486 as they don't on Pentium. Unless it's one of the rare cases where the board can be slowed so much to go to XT areas for fun reasons, I really don't get it.

I like 486 today for a lot of reasons, fitness for DOS gaming is not one of them.
 
No 3D game will run great on a 486. I had a 486/160 system on a PCI bus and the second DOS Quake came out I dumped it for a Pentium based system. Even on 2D game systems a VLB or PCI 486 would run circles around an ISA video based 486. Having said that a 486/66 was the gold standard for gaming for a while, but no single system can run the whole DOS era even today (some too fast, some too slow).
 
Main appeal to me is less power and noise. Don't need a fan, can get by with a good heatsink on the CPU. These days I'm the opposite of an overclocker (until it comes to rendering video, then every core better be sizzling).

The appeal is also just representing the historical period of what could actually be experienced by most users at the time. 386's covering about 1988-1992 era, 486's being that intermediate 1992-1996 era (in terms of what was practically affordable and hand-me-down available). Obviously there is overlap, my first P-90 tower was in 1995.

I still prefer the hardware - and those little ITX PSUs with AT power adapters make it easy (and fanless) for power. But experience-wise, I think it's good to keep the emulators honest by having a period-representative setup (but I cross the line with mechanical hard drives, I'm done with those :) )


FS5 (FlightSim5) performs so much more smoothly with this PCI card also. However, ST:TNG Final Unity broke and wouldn't run with this PCI S3 card. All I had to do was find VESA drivers, then it started working again (and in SVGA). ST:TNG also does require a 486 (won't run on a 386), same with original Need for Speed (uses some 486-only instructions).
 
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There is also the Tandy/PC Jr XT/AT CGA era of DOS games that don't look good on VGA era equipment and don't have the correct sound chip. I have a bunch of old games on 5.25"/3.5" floppies and like machines that can run them from. I can't be the only one who has those old Thrustmaster flight sticks or yoke/pedals that need an ISA card to work.
 
I have one of those Logitech WingMan Thrust 3D force-feedback sticks, but it's not very good (at least for flight sims, the range seems unusually limited -- and I can't find any DOS software that really uses the force feedback feature; maybe it's more suited to Win95/DirectX stuff).

And I think Zare was saying there is plenty of interest in classic DOS gaming, just not specifically with 486 equipment -- which would be fairly overpowered for CGA or early Sierra-era games, and underpowered for more mainstream 3D games of interest. FWIW, I've noticed that 486DX laptops are kind of hard to find - lots of 486SX's just not DX's.
 
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486sx laptops probably used old 386 board designs. There are plenty of 486DX laptops around, at least some Thinkpads (370, 701 and 755 series). NEC Versa series, Toshiba and Compaq made some nice 486 laptops as well.
 
Yeah, the best 486DX laptop I have is the Toshiba Satellite T1960CT (very compact, DX2/50). Just in general 486DX's (laptops) just don't seem as easy to find these days (which just leads me to think not as many were made)
 
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