ZDoom

I didn't know 47i.cab existed at all but today I downloaded it...

I'm ASTONISHED!!!, I always thought Zdoom was the fastest port on fucken earth and it indeed was, but this lil baby with uncapped frames is something magical...

I'm running a creepy non-accelerated 8mb video card which I was about to trash but Zdoom showed me the light!, there's no reason for doing so cos my fav game will run so fast that my eyes won't be able to sync and I'll be probably forced to close them to avoid massive epileptic convulsions.

If I was developing a Doom port, I would be jumping from a cliff right now.

Just fix the missing scream for the marine and add original demo compatibility and we'll have the Best and Flawless Doom Port instead of the current Best Doom Port.

10000 ups to Randy for this.

That's a lot of ups.

What missing marine scream? That sounds like something you could fix by modifying SNDINFO anyway.

Your video card is not to be faulted or credited for ZDoom's performance. ZDoom doesn't use any hardware acceleration (unless there's some minor DirectX stuff Randy's using), so yes, your video card is still shit. Even so, a newer video card won't really affect ZDoom's performance that much aside from maybe allowing higher resolutions. Your processor and RAM are really what matter here.

Ultraviolet wrote:Your video card is not to be faulted or credited for ZDoom's performance.

It can be credited for it if it's not an ISA video card.

Doom wrote:...add original demo compatibility...

Impossible.

Ultraviolet wrote:What missing marine scream? That sounds like something you could fix by modifying SNDINFO anyway.

He's referring to the fact that at the end of Doom 2 when you're going through the list of enemies, "Our Hero" doesn't play his death sound when he dies. Clearly, this is a HUGE oversight and fixing it should be top priority. Let the crash bugs be damned.

HotWax wrote: He's referring to the fact that at the end of Doom 2 when you're going through the list of enemies, "Our Hero" doesn't play his death sound when he dies. Clearly, this is a HUGE oversight and fixing it should be top priority. Let the crash bugs be damned.

rofl

HotWax wrote:

Doom wrote:...add original demo compatibility...

Impossible.

Then, how about VIDD?

Hirogen2 wrote:

HotWax wrote:

Doom wrote:...add original demo compatibility...

Impossible.

Then, how about VIDD?

I think it's the same.

ZDoom has gone too far from the original code to have demo compatibility with any other source port. It's just too different.
Don't forget that the source ports with a good compatibility are the ones which have the least (or most uninteresting) features. It is nearly impossible to maintain demo compatibility when you are adding cool stuff. The slope stuff alone should be enough to make it impossible.
Anyway, who cares? When I want to watch demos I am using PrBoom. Demo playback seems to be its main reason for existence...

I think jDoom has uncapped framerate, or at least higher than 35, so ZDoom isn't the first.

Ultraviolet wrote:What missing marine scream? That sounds like something you could fix by modifying SNDINFO anyway.

Your video card is not to be faulted or credited for ZDoom's performance. ZDoom doesn't use any hardware acceleration (unless there's some minor DirectX stuff Randy's using), so yes, your video card is still shit. Even so, a newer video card won't really affect ZDoom's performance that much aside from maybe allowing higher resolutions. Your processor and RAM are really what matter here.

If I had a 1mb video card, not even a whole GB of ram would help me...
I can't notice a single frame drop using 800x600 and under, if I try higher resolutions, it will slow down a bit but 800x600 is more than great for what I need. And a video accelerator would do more than just allowing me to play fast in 1024x768 and up. If I get close to a very rocket-impacted wall, frames will drop to almost 0 and same seems to happen with blood stains. With a video accelerator this is just unnoticeable to the human eye.

I only play Doom so if Doom runs smooth here, my video card is ok. I doubt I'll be switching to OpenGl this decade, I don't need it, I like old school games plus I'm somehow cheap.

Doom wrote:And a video accelerator would do more than just allowing me to play fast in 1024x768 and up. If I get close to a very rocket-impacted wall, frames will drop to almost 0 and same seems to happen with blood stains. With a video accelerator this is just unnoticeable to the human eye.

And if you stuck a blender on your counter and didn't plug it in, your dishes would get done faster, too.

A video accelerator is not a magic wand that takes anything with graphics and speeds it up. If something is not programmed to use acceleration features, then those features won't be used. It's as simple as that. When you write for OpenGL or D3D, you use functions that the driver translates into commands to the card, such as calculating lighting or how a particular polygon (triangle) made up of three points in 3D space would translate to your 2D screen. The video card then does all the calulations in hardware and draws the result to the screen, which anybody with half a brain will tell you is a good sight faster than doing the same thing in software. In that way, graphics are "accelerated". Since ZDoom is using your CPU to calculate all of that, the only thing the video card is doing is taking what it's given and putting it on the screen. It has no ability to "step in" and rewrite ZDoom's code to use the acceleration features. Just like how that blender is going to do no one any good unplugged.

I have tried Zdoom on my own pc (Intel PIII 550mhz + 120mb RAM + 8mb video) as well as on a friend of mine's (Intel PIII 450mhz + 128mb RAM + G-force 64mb) and the last one doesn't drop a frame when you get close to a rocket hole, simple as that. Zdoom might not support video acceleration but remember that video accelerators speed things up in software mode too. It doesn't take any opengl drivers to run Zdoom but the more mb's your video card has, the faster games will run, no matter if the acceleration capability itself isn't supported.

Unless you can explain how a slower CPU can run Zdoom faster, I'd say Mr.G-force helped a bit.

Doom wrote:when you get close to a rocket hole

Just fire all 100 shells from the SuperShotgun on the same spot... and, well see.
Because a shell makes 7 pellets, a rocket only 1.

Doom wrote:I have tried Zdoom on my own pc (Intel PIII 550mhz + 120mb RAM + 8mb video) as well as on a friend of mine's (Intel PIII 450mhz + 128mb RAM + G-force 64mb) and the last one doesn't drop a frame when you get close to a rocket hole, simple as that. Zdoom might not support video acceleration but remember that video accelerators speed things up in software mode too. It doesn't take any opengl drivers to run Zdoom but the more mb's your video card has, the faster games will run, no matter if the acceleration capability itself isn't supported.

Unless you can explain how a slower CPU can run Zdoom faster, I'd say Mr.G-force helped a bit.

Are you sure you're not talking about ZDoomGL? Because you seem to be quite confused. This line:

Zdoom might not support video acceleration but remember that video accelerators speed things up in software mode too.

Is, for all practical intents and purposes, completely false. While there are 2D accelerations and the movement from RAM to screen might be marginally (10ths of a second type marginally) faster, there would be no difference significant enough to make note of.

When ZDoom draws "a rocket hole" it first renders the texture normally, one column at a time, then it goes back and applies the rocket decal with transparency over the texture. It repeats for each decal present, which means that the rendering power involved grows with each additional decal. At no point does it use the video card to help out. It doesn't use it to render the surface, texture it, position it in 3D space, calculate translucency or apply any of the decal layers. All of that is done using your CPU and the resultant frame is sent to your video card to be plastered up on your monitor. At which point that GeForce moves the bits involved 10% faster than your clunker. Hooray!

As for explaining why his plays faster, have you checked all the settings to verify that everything is the same on both machines? Is his com_maxdecals settings lower than yours? Is he running in a lower resolution? There are plenty of things that could account for the better performance.

Video cards can have a big noticable impact on performance for ZDOOM. For example, just compare a board with the Intel imbedded video (82810) vs a GF of any type. Like comparing molasses to water.

There does come a point where the vid card makes little difference - where vid bandwidth is higher than cpu bandwidth - meaning the cpu time it takes to calculate "game stuff" is much more than the time to blit the data to the vid card. For example, small levels tend to show bigger increases than huge levels.

All this depends on the level size, texture size, cpu speed, bus speed and so forth. That's why Randy mentioned ISA cards. ISA is such a relatively slow bus that it always bottlenecks ZDOOM.