System Shock 2 — Frame-rate on 1998 retro PC (Pentium II 400 / 3dfx Voodoo 2 / Windows 98) — EAX
Dipshidian
1,408 views
REAL PERIOD-CORRECT HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Oops, I captured System Shock 2 again, but this time on a slightly older Thief-contemporary machine; the trusty old Pentium II 400 and Voodoo 2 combo. Compared to Thief 1, Shock 2 puts up a somewhat harder fight for the CPU and 3D card. How so? That's what I'm hoping this video will answer for you.
Aside from the obvious more-geometry-equals-less-performance factor, other demanding aspects of System Shock 2 include the alpha blending of transparencies (like smoke, gases, etc.), which hits the 3D card/GPU the hardest. The higher the density of overlapping "particles"/alphas, the more the demands on the 3D card increase.
There is also slow-down involved with any kind of explosions going off, whether from grenades or barrels. Presumably, this has to do with (among other things) hit/collision detection of the explosion's radius against any nearby entities/objects.
NPC activity takes a fairly big toll on CPU time, and it actively drains a bunch of cycles here and there based on the actions and pace of the AI entitites, as well as the number of enemies nearby. For example, enemies patrolling around casually and occasionally being distracted by noises won't be as strenous on the CPU as enemies being alerted to the player's existence and actively trying to hunt the player down. Under the right circumstances, it's possible to cause massive performance stalls if the player alerts an enemy and hides out of range and/or out of reach from said fully alerted enemy. This indicates a small oversight in how the pathing or tracking of the player by the enemies is handled in the game's code or scripts.
Seeing as how the game uses Direct3D as the primary graphics rendering API, there is also a ”loss” of performance from not tapping into the Voodoo 2’s full potential (using the Glide API).
- GAME SETTINGS - -
The video and sound options are as shown in the video itself, and nothing more. No tweaks this time.
Positional audio and EAX are both enabled for the coolness factor, and this does ever so slightly lower the average frame-rate. The drivers being used for the SB Live are EAX 2.0-compliant, which means that we get better positional audio in System Shock 2 than with older VXD drivers, with a negligible (if not non-existent) performance cost.
640x480 was the chosen resolution so that we may better observe how the processor handles the game on its own, even though the Voodoo 2 sometimes gets a little overwhelmed in its own ways.
- SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS -
Operating system used: Microsoft Windows 98 (First Edition/FE).
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Live: 4.06.610 VXD / LiveWare 2.0 (May 1999).
Drivers used for Voodoo2: 3dfx Voodoo2 V3.01.00 (October 1998).
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998 according to case label)
Intel 440BX chipset
Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card (2164W chip manufactured week 4 1998)
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card (old variant with dark-colored circuit board, board manufactured week 9 1998)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card (board manufactured week 21 1998)
192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM (1x128MB & 1x64MB DIMM, manufactured week 42 1998 & week 11 1998)
The capturing was done with VCS (VisionRGB Capture Scaler) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into the following system: ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard, Intel Core i7-2600K CPU, 8 GBs DDR3 SDRAM, nVidia GTX 580 video card. A VGA-to-DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
TIMESTAMPZ
0:00 - Start-up
0:24 - Main Menu
0:39 - Training Facility
1:25 - Medical/Science
7:32 - Engineering
8:42 - Cargo Bay
10:56 - Hydroponics
16:11 - Operations
20:55 - Recreation
4 Comments
In 1998 Pentium II 400 / 3dfx Voodoo 2 was very powerful combo.
Fraps steal some fps, on real hardware you can overclock CPU and tweak Voodoo2 for faster Mhz and gain
10fps extra. A little hack for you hackers
For it's time the Pentium II was an excellent CPU. Even a year later it could still hold a candle to it's newer brothers as the fastest the most common Pentium III in 1999 was 500 MHz (550 and 600 existed but were too expensive). So perhaps this was a rare moment where high-end 1998 build was not obsolete a year later :D. Especially with Voodoo 2 cards which was plenty powerful even for 1999 standards.
Perhaps something similar applies to a 1995 build with Pentium 133. This CPU (especially with a Triton motherboard) would serve you well a year or two.
System Shock 2 — Frame-rate on 1998 retro PC (Pentium II 400 / 3dfx Voodoo 2 / Windows 98) — EAX
Dipshidian
1,408 views
REAL PERIOD-CORRECT HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Oops, I captured System Shock 2 again, but this time on a slightly older Thief-contemporary machine; the trusty old Pentium II 400 and Voodoo 2 combo. Compared to Thief 1, Shock 2 puts up a somewhat harder fight for the CPU and 3D card. How so? That's what I'm hoping this video will answer for you.
Aside from the obvious more-geometry-equals-less-performance factor, other demanding aspects of System Shock 2 include the alpha blending of transparencies (like smoke, gases, etc.), which hits the 3D card/GPU the hardest. The higher the density of overlapping "particles"/alphas, the more the demands on the 3D card increase.
There is also slow-down involved with any kind of explosions going off, whether from grenades or barrels. Presumably, this has to do with (among other things) hit/collision detection of the explosion's radius against any nearby entities/objects.
NPC activity takes a fairly big toll on CPU time, and it actively drains a bunch of cycles here and there based on the actions and pace of the AI entitites, as well as the number of enemies nearby. For example, enemies patrolling around casually and occasionally being distracted by noises won't be as strenous on the CPU as enemies being alerted to the player's existence and actively trying to hunt the player down. Under the right circumstances, it's possible to cause massive performance stalls if the player alerts an enemy and hides out of range and/or out of reach from said fully alerted enemy. This indicates a small oversight in how the pathing or tracking of the player by the enemies is handled in the game's code or scripts.
Seeing as how the game uses Direct3D as the primary graphics rendering API, there is also a ”loss” of performance from not tapping into the Voodoo 2’s full potential (using the Glide API).
- GAME SETTINGS - -
The video and sound options are as shown in the video itself, and nothing more. No tweaks this time.
Positional audio and EAX are both enabled for the coolness factor, and this does ever so slightly lower the average frame-rate. The drivers being used for the SB Live are EAX 2.0-compliant, which means that we get better positional audio in System Shock 2 than with older VXD drivers, with a negligible (if not non-existent) performance cost.
640x480 was the chosen resolution so that we may better observe how the processor handles the game on its own, even though the Voodoo 2 sometimes gets a little overwhelmed in its own ways.
- SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS -
Operating system used: Microsoft Windows 98 (First Edition/FE).
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Live: 4.06.610 VXD / LiveWare 2.0 (May 1999).
Drivers used for Voodoo2: 3dfx Voodoo2 V3.01.00 (October 1998).
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998 according to case label)
Intel 440BX chipset
Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card (2164W chip manufactured week 4 1998)
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card (old variant with dark-colored circuit board, board manufactured week 9 1998)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card (board manufactured week 21 1998)
192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM (1x128MB & 1x64MB DIMM, manufactured week 42 1998 & week 11 1998)
The capturing was done with VCS (VisionRGB Capture Scaler) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into the following system: ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard, Intel Core i7-2600K CPU, 8 GBs DDR3 SDRAM, nVidia GTX 580 video card. A VGA-to-DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
TIMESTAMPZ
0:00 - Start-up
0:24 - Main Menu
0:39 - Training Facility
1:25 - Medical/Science
7:32 - Engineering
8:42 - Cargo Bay
10:56 - Hydroponics
16:11 - Operations
20:55 - Recreation
Here are some notes about the footage:
(1) I originally captured this footage with slightly older drivers (Driver Kit Version 2.10, from July 1998) for the Voodoo 2, only to realize that it had some undesirable quirks which made me re-do all capturing! I ended up using the "3dfx Voodoo2 V3.01.00" drivers (as they're called by the FalconFly 3dfx archive) from October '98. They didn't perform differently at all, in most circumstances, but for some reason the frame-rate was capped at 30hz on the later floors (Hydroponics and onward) when using the older drivers. Weird.
(2) System Shock 2 is an EAX 1.0-designed game, but I decided to use the first EAX 2.0-compliant drivers instead, 4.06.610 VxD, for enhanced 3D positioning in this game. It doesn't change anything else, as far as I can tell, including performance (I did a short preliminary test to confirm this. It was negligible, if noticeable at all).
(3) I didn't show it off in this capture, but there are some cases of insane slow-down (at least in the unpatched 1.15 version of the game) that can happen as a result of AI/NPC-related scripting going rogue (possibly having to do with path-finding). This can be observed under certain conditions when enemies are standing in locations where they can't reach the player while also made fully aware of the player (this includes enemies spawning in inaccessible places during alarms). I have also seen equally crazy stuff happen if you climb on top of furniture (or otherwise stand in an inaccessible spot) when chased by an annelid worm. The frame-rate can drop as far as into the low teens (on a P2 400 MHz, that is), if not lower, during these freak-outs!
(4) The gamma levels being used is the default Voodoo 2 control panel gamma value (1.3, I think?). It might be more optimal to use slightly lower values when casually enjoying the game, but I didn't want to introduce the risk of YT compressing the video harder because of the darker colors at low gamma/brightness, so I left it as-is.
(5) Similarly to Deus Ex, explosions going off will cause brief slow-down spikes. The conga line of explosive barrels at the start of Cargo Bay (9:05 in the video) is a great demonstration of why too many simultaneous explosions is bad for frame-rates! Unlike Deus Ex, System Shock 2 doesn't have to perform additional collision checks against an expanding shock-wave emitting from each explosion. You can only imagine how much harder things could have chugged in Cargo Bay if this had been the case!