Geforce mx440 would be useless for early gz versions?

[invictius]

[quote=Graf Zahl]The GF4 MX is a very, very weak card and doesn't even support all the features GZDoom needs to run properly.[/quote]

I've made the effort to research user reports but have only really found out that people had trouble using opengl 1.2 on relatively late builds. I'm predicting that 1.2 was never supported?

Quoted text in more context here: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/42174-opengl-zdoom/?do=findComment&comment=705247

[drfrag]

Not useless, but that card was pretty much like a very fast geforce2 and had no shaders. GZDoom 1.8.x never supported GL 1.2 officially (Graf could not test) but i tested 1.8.4 on a tnt2 m64 with an old GL 1.2 driver and it ran fine hence LE requires GL 1.2. But of course there were many GL 1.2 cards with crappy hardware and drivers. LE runs even on my trident blade xp with some graphic problems, on my voodoo3s with mesafx mostly runs fine and it's fast.
Also older versions of GZDoom such as 1.0.18 (and the CL version) ran on 1.1 cards (not all) but you would miss some features there already.

[Graf Zahl]

My very first private versions were developed on a real Geforce 4.
When that computer died I got a new one from an electronics store that came with a Geforce 5200 preinstalled. Knowing how bad that card was I also ordered a Geforce 5900 online but of course before installing it ran some tests with th Geforce 5200. Well, it worked, technically, but it showed very serious performance issues with non-vanilla maps that dared to have a bit more detail than the original visplane and drawsegs limit allowed. While it may be interesting for technical reasons, these old low-end cards were simply not usable for actual playing. And considering that the Geforce 4 MX was two entire generations behind the already slow Geforce 5200, one can do the math what kind of levels it could handle.

[drfrag]

Actually most Geforce4 MX cards were 128 bit while most FX 5200 were 64 bit cards, so the MX440 was actually much faster. Just try, those cards had only up to GL 1.5 support. I own a FX 5700 Ultra BTW.

[Graf Zahl]

Ok, I have to admit that this isn't too surprising. That Geforce 5200 was the worst piece of graphics hardware I ever ran GZDoom on.

[Rachael]

I had a 5500 and it wasn't a heck of a lot better.

That was actually my main card from 2007 to 2009 before I got an ATI HD 2400 which ran a whole lot better, but had issues of its own.

[Graf Zahl]

The 5500 was ok, the 5200 was a disaster. I had some 'fun' playing around with it a little. It was barely capable of sustaining 35 fps on medium sized maps.

[invictius]

Not useless, but that card was pretty much like a very fast geforce2 and had no shaders. GZDoom 1.8.x never supported GL 1.2 officially (Graf could not test) but i tested 1.8.4 on a tnt2 m64 with an old GL 1.2 driver and it ran fine hence LE requires GL 1.2. But of course there were many GL 1.2 cards with crappy hardware and drivers. LE runs even on my trident blade xp with some graphic problems, on my voodoo3s with mesafx mostly runs fine and it's fast.
Also older versions of GZDoom such as 1.0.18 (and the CL version) ran on 1.1 cards (not all) but you would miss some features there already.

Interesting, I tried the very first public release of gz and it claimed the mx440 wasn't accelerated - though maybe it was because I was using windows xp drivers for it on server 2003.

Tei Tenga runs around 40fps on a radeon 7500 which seems to have full opengl 1.5 features.

[drfrag]

The FX 5200 and 5500 are pretty much the same card, just a slight clock increase there. For the 5500 there were also 64 and 128 bit versions. I also own one of these and mine is the 128 bit one.
The radeon 7500 was an original radeon with higher clocks and the geforce4 mx was a better card, the 7500 didn't run doom 3 properly.
PS: the first version requiring SSE2 i think was 3.0. What don't you just create a 'random invictius questions' thread?

[Graf Zahl]

Checking videocardbenchmark.com confirms that Geforce 5200 and 5500 are roughly equal, but they list the 440 MX as a lot slower. So what is it?

[Graf Zahl]

PS: the first version requiring SSE2 i think was 3.0. What don't you just create a 'random invictius questions' thread?

And the reason being that trying to compile the true color drawers on a non-SSE setup did not work. When that turned out to be a hassle it was quickly decided to just dump support for that batch of really old CPUs.

[drfrag]

I guess that's becouse the MX could not run some tests (no shaders) hence the lower overall score. AFAIR performance was similar to the 128 bit 5200 (in DX7 games of course).

Edit: i think they compile now but it's not worth, the new LLVM drawers are much faster on modern CPUs but for old CPUs is right the opposite and the old C++ drawers are much faster instead, the difference is massive there. That said i cannot fix 3dfloors for them so any help would still be welcome.

[drfrag]

Due to people's interest i've digged up an old OpenGL benchmark:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vga ... 730-7.html