ZDoom

Sometimes if you want to do benchmarks against a wide variety of systems, is just makes sense to use the same card and bus type for all machines, so I might buy a heap of geforce 5500's (especially since they can do opengl2 and thus run the latest gzdoom). Do they hold up against most recent mainstream wads? Not expecting a miracle, would just do all my tests in 640*480 if needed.

I've never used them with a fast CPU but I remember back then the GPU being the actual bottleneck. And even top hardware of that time had its problems with mods like P:AR which in 2003 was a close as you could get with pushing the system to its limits.

I absolutely have no idea what you want to test here, but wth such an obsolete graphics card you'll not even benchmark the most relevant parts of the GL renderer but merely the legacy fallback path which has already been stripped off some more resource demanding things.

Graf Zahl wrote:I've never used them with a fast CPU but I remember back then the GPU being the actual bottleneck. And even top hardware of that time had its problems with mods like P:AR which in 2003 was a close as you could get with pushing the system to its limits.

I absolutely have no idea what you want to test here, but wth such an obsolete graphics card you'll not even benchmark the most relevant parts of the GL renderer but merely the legacy fallback path which has already been stripped off some more resource demanding things.

Well, not so much gzdoom but I was interested in how back to saturn runs on close-to-vanilla ports, since it's built within vanilla limitations. Even a p2-350 couldn't handle map 4 without dipping the framerate (on mbf 2.04, only dos port I know of with a frame counter) - for simplicity's sake I'd probably just try zdoom on much more up to date hardware.

BTSX was made with vanilla limitations in mind but that doesn't mean it plays well on all vanilla compatible hardware.

I still remember some maps from the early years that required quite a bit more power than what was common at that time to run without hiccups. It was actually quite frequent that the frame rate dipped below 35 fps. The first system I had that was able to play vanilla at fullscreen without frame skips was a P90. This was not enough for larger maps, though. The 80486 I was using at work back then didn't fare so well and let's not even talk about the 80386 I had when Doom came out...

Graf Zahl wrote:BTSX was made with vanilla limitations in mind but that doesn't mean it plays well on all vanilla compatible hardware.

I still remember some maps from the early years that required quite a bit more power than what was common at that time to run without hiccups. It was actually quite frequent that the frame rate dipped below 35 fps. The first system I had that was able to play vanilla at fullscreen without frame skips was a P90. This was not enough for larger maps, though. The 80486 I was using at work back then didn't fare so well and let's not even talk about the 80386 I had when Doom came out...

I thought the vanilla limitaions would put a "cap" on the hardware required to keep it at a constant framerate (excluding nuts etc of course). Would you expect btsx to need better hardware than eternal?

It's more than just the complexity of the maps that dictates how much processor power is needed. Because while a vanilla map would have a visplane overflow long before it could cram enough sectors to bring a computer to its knees, there are no such problems with, for example, large amounts of active monsters in a wide-open area.

Remember, Nuts.wad is technically vanilla.

There is indeed a sprite limit in vanilla but I don't think it was to control the frame rate, but I could be wrong. Unlike other limits though, sprites simply disappeared.