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New 3D Cards On Slower PCs
risotto writes "There's always that dilemma of whether to upgrade your CPU or your video card first. There's a useful piece that shows some of today's fastest 3D accelerators but on lower end systems like an Intel Celeron 700 and a AMD Duron 700. There's some pretty big performance jumps to be had by throwing a T&L capable Geforce 2 GTS into a low end system in Quake III and the like."
Oops. Forgot I wanted to post more. Here is the second part of my post. This is an actual review of "fast" cards on "slow" systems.
.6)
;-) It's the same story as Quake3, it looks darn good on a VD3 3K, even at 1024x768. In fact, I would go so far as to say it shines.
System 1: K6-2/350, 128MB PC100, Voodoo3 2000 AGP
OS: Slackware 7.0, Linux 2.2.16
XFree: 3.3.5 (i think; maybe
Games: Solitaire under Wine, Doom2, Quake[123], Unreal Tournament
The non-3D accelerated games (Sol, Doom2, Quake1) were very fast, very playable. Nobody can have any complaints, except perhaps one: when you win the game in Solitaire, the cards-falling-down animation is *s*l*o*w* compared to the computer. Oh well.
The 3D accelerated games also worked pretty well. Quake2 looked just like it was supposed to -- nice and fast, smooth, no problems, very playable. Quake3, on the other hand, was taking a little long to load, but once you got in, it was pretty decent. It was NOT full-framerate by any means, but it was still enjoyable to play. Unreal Tournament I didn't get to try on there for very long, but what I saw looked good -- it was pretty smooth, and overall very nice. Keep in mind I used Glide on UT, not OGL.
Overall rating: 6 out of 10, mainly for playability.
System 2: K6-3/450, 128MB PC100, Voodoo3 3000 AGP (with TVout)
OS: Win98 (blech) && Slackware 7.1
XFree: 3.3.6
Games (Win98): Terminal Velocity, SW Pod Racer, Quake3, Parsec, Parsec LAN-test, Spear of Destiny
Games (Linux): Quake3, Unreal Tournament
All of the "older" games under Win98 were pretty kickass. Spear of Destiny looks good on a 486, so you can bet it looks good on a K6-3! Terminal Velocity maxes out around a P200, so same there. Parsec (and Parsec LAN-test) look very nice, especially at 1024x768, and there are no problems with speed, either. The two major Win98 games, then, are Quake3 and PodRacer.
Quake3 was noticeably improved from System 1. It loads much faster, and the gameplay is quite smooth -- even at 1024x768. (I usually play in 800x600.) If you're looking to make a gaming system from a K6-[23]/450 and play Q3, do it!
Pod Racer is the reason I had to have windblows on here in the first place. I cannot resist the temptation to run myself into walls at 800 Mph
Linux games: Q3 and UT. Q3 is basically the same story as Q3 under windblows above. I couldn't tell you which is faster, as this is all perceptual, and there's not a whole lot of difference between win98 and linux 2.2 on the same hardware.
UT is where this hardware gets a gold medal -- there are no problems with speed to hinder your gameplay, it basically kicks ass. You will love it, if you try out this combo.
Overall rating: 8 out of 10.
System 3: dual celeron 366, 192MB PC100, Matrox G400 AGP single-headed 16MB
OS: Slackware 7.1, Linux 2.4.0-test[78] (oh yeah!)
XFree: 4.0.1 with supported DRI and GLX and XVideo and everything
Games: Quake[123], UnrealTournament
Quake 1 rocks. It absolutely rocks. There is no point in me saying any more, as it rocks on a lesser system anyway.
Quake 2 rocks as well. This is where an intel chip, as opposed to amd, really does you well. (celeron vs. k6, much better fpu). The graphics are SUPER-SWEET too.
Quake 3, perceptually, is every bit as fast as on System 2 (they're side-by-side), and it loads faster, to boot! This is a very strong system for gaming. If you're looking to play Q3, and have "only" two lower-end celerons, don't worry! Just get a good video card.
UnrealTournament: well, ummm, it crashes during the opening sequence. This is due to a combination of lots of not-so-well-tested software -- linux 2.4.0-test7, whatever kernel DRI module is included with that, some unknown version of XFree4.0.1, and the OpenGL rendering subsystem of UnrealTournament. (On the other systems, I always used Glide for UT.) So, while the part of the opening sequence I can see looks really good, do yourself a favor and try it on a more stable system.
Overall rating: 7 out of 10, because I couldn't play all my games. I was forced to use OpenGL exclusively by the MGA400.
That's all for now, and if you want to know any more, just e-mail me, or reply to the post. I check my responses.
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>I could use some extra crispyness when playing divx movies
:).
Hmm... was this intentional? Your computer might be a bit toasty with a 1.5GHz P4
I was amazed of the obsolescence speed of my Diamond Viper v550 16 meg AGP card. Got it 2 years ago when many other video cards only had 4 or 8 megs. Now I just got a GeForce, and Halflife doesn't crash as much.
I have a PIII 500, 768MB of Ram PC100, running an Abit Mobo with a BX chipset... and I thought I was special.
No a G400Max doesnt tear through Quake framerates, and apparently my system is low end now a days.....
Fortunately for us processor speed has finally outstripped processor need (for the majority of applications).
Now its a matter of data transfer and the processor wasting cycles waiting.
So.. I wont be upgrading until something truly excites me.. 1.2Ghz processors do not.
Jeremy
Wow what would you call my P120?
Are YOU listed?
A celeron 700 is a 'low-end' system? Christ..
My celeron 450 still does me fine, even for new games. Starting to get a bit sluggish on the new ones...
I am glad to see that the computer terms have really gone to hell. Lower End used to mean that you owned a PC that could still run all the programs, just at a slower rate. My 400Mhz K6-2 could run anything...-well besides high rendering programs-...that I want.
I consider Lower End systems to be Celeron 333s..early generation PIIs. Stuff that is really getting on in the years. Not sh*t that was released a few months back.
Just cause we had (still have) a processor war for Mhz does not mean the older hardware is obselete. Programs can barely keep up, and I hope it stays that way.
It used to be that your PC is obselete after a few years...now its obselete as soon as you fork over the money.
You could say that this is all AMDs fault. If it wasn't for the K7, the processor wars would not have happened and Intel would probably have just been releasing new PIII-550s or something right about now. There would be more of a balance. But then again, AMD processors kick ass and have forced Intel to realize that their little monopoly is over.
All they really have going for them right now is mobile and dual processor systems.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
"lower end systems like an Intel Celeron 700 and a AMD Duron 700"
Geez, I really need to upgrade. I really havn't had that much trouble getting by with a 300 pII, w/80 mb ram. Anyone else agree?
Show the wife, parents, S.O., boss this article!
See here! My computing power is hopelessly inadequate. I NEEEEED faster hardware!
They even agree on Slashdot!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We had a debate where I worked many years ago (late '80s) about how PCs, generally, had crappy overall designs than some of the other systems we were using. The PC folks would crow about how their system was better than our VAXes because it had a faster CPU clock (stupid criterion most would agree). Meanwhile we'd ask the PC bigots why our software ran faster on our slower-clock-rate VAX than it did on their PC. We were careful to write code that could run on either the VAX, PC, or the behemoth IBMs at the central data center. (The IBM's were, by far, the fastest boxes but were so heavily loaded that they were everyone's last choice.) The result of our debate was the conclusion that the VAX (and the IBMs) had a more balanced design and better software. Our in-house benchmarks showed our ``lowly'' VAXen beating the latest Intel boxes; the balanced system was clearly superior for what we needed to do: software development, number crunching, and for most of us, documentation (using TeX). I'd rather have a slightly slower system with software built with a great compiler.
The PC vendors spend much of their efforts putting a very fast processor in a system with fairly pathetic I/O subsystem. For a single user system this seems reasonable. Systems that were designed with multiple users in mind had to take into account the possibility that multiple processes would be performing I/O and you saw features such as elevator seeking in device drivers that are only recently coming into vogue on the PC. I.e., some effort was going into addressing real performance problems instead of merely figuring out how to get the latest, fastest processor into the system.
Software bloat is part of a continuing problem. When your word processor needs more RAM in a single PC than we used to have on all the PCs in all the offices in our department, something's really wrong. Not a new problem, though, and it's not all about unneeded features (although that's a huge problem lately). I once obtained a piece of software from COSMIC which stated that it would need 512KB of memory in order to run. Using the MS FORTRAN compiler this was true. However, we stuck the source out on our old PDP-11 (remember, I'm talking about mid/late '80s) and the compiler was able to generate an executable that ran in under 128KB on a system using I/D space. Since no one was willing to tie up their (or any) PC for the week or so that it would take to run the simulation -- at least not after we ran it the first time -- guess where it wound up being deployed? No code changes were made so, apparently, DEC's F77 compiler could optimize rings around MS's (no surprise to me there). The balanced system running superior software wins again.
I see some strange tradeoffs being made in the PC/Windows area that don't make sense to me: write crappy, inefficient software and throw hardware at the resulting mess in order to get it to run. Now that PCs are being used for multiprocessing and multiple users, the need for quality software is beginning important again.
Hardware-wise, I'll always prefer to do my homework and choose a vendor that addresses all the aspects of the system and bypass the folks that think they're state-of-art by dropping the lastest hot motherboard into a box. Since so many PC vendors change components without notice I've been opting to build my own systems for a long time now. Last year's processor with 256MB of RAM would be preferable to this year's smoker with only 64MB. Before they became nothing but 200-page advertisement collections, the PC rags used to do decent benchmarks that could show the strengths and deficiencies of various vendors systems. You don't see those any more. Pity.
Sorry if I got into rant mode. This is just one of my continuing pet peeves.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Let me chime in as well with being perplexed.
I have a PIII-6xx at work running NT 4.0, and at home I have a Celeron 366 o/c'ed to 460 with 192MB running Win2K. Frankly, qualitatively speaking there is no difference between the two systems. Ok, the PIII at work is a Dell OptiPlex GX1 with a crappy built-in ATI 3D Rage Pro 4MB, while at home I run a TNT2 16MB. Still, with the apps I'm using--Delphi 4, IE5, Visual Studio 6, Word etc--I simply can't tell a noticeable difference between the two machines. I'm sure running the latest 3D games would reveal a significant fps difference, but since I don't, that doesn't matter. I'd be an utter fool to go out and spend money on the current generation of high-end CPUs. Especially since qualitatively the difference between a PIII-6xx and a PIII-1G is probably even smaller.
Well, if you are having problems getting rid of those old 700Mhz systems, I can probably offer you a fair price. Let's say $100 a piece?
After all, they are nearly useless nowadays anyway.
When Hemos stated lowend, he wasn't referring to the number of cycles per second the CPU was able to do. Rather, he was talking about the low cache Duron and Celeron CPUs. Good writing doesn't make you think like the author before you understand the prose, and this post was not good writing.
However, what the hell do you think you are all doing by correcting him?
Michael Labbe
And I thought I used old systems! :-)
Hell, I can remember when a 1.13 MHz Intel chip would have been considered awesome. How fast was the clock in the Altair again?
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I -completely- agree. I've been just fine and dandy with my K6-2 333 (overclocked to 350), with 128 MB RAM and a TNT2 Ultra. I, also, play counter-strike well on my system, fragging up there with the best of them (guess my cable modem helps too...).
.sigs??
-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The Unreal Engine has historically been notoriously crappy on NVidia hardware (well, most anything except 3DFX/Glide, really). Its not so much that its bloatware as it is that some of the 3D subsystems (texture management, especially) are somewhat legacy and were originally written with Glide and software rendering in mind.
This has been fixed quite a bit over the past year...Hopefully some future patch to Deus Ex will roll the improvements into that game.
My PC at home is "low end" -- it's an old P75 with a 300MHz AMD K6-2 in it. Lets see what a decent 3D card does in that!
Variex is a typical Frnech slang word to design the kind of W4rr10rZ that love to boost their pissies.
I personally use a K6-2/350 (half what you call a low-end PC) with an ATI-AIW (Rage128)/16Mo. I have never attempted to measur my framerate under Quake3 or UT but I just love it as it is.
Do you think I am a spoiler or I am just trying to open your eyes on the difference between specs and sufficient confortable playability ?
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
A 700MHz Celeron/Duron box is pretty much the lowest spec you can buy these days. Intel/AMD no longer make chips at clock speeds less than that. My 300MHz Celeron isn't 'low end'. Its obsolete.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Bah. I spent $0.75 and bought me a pair of 3D glasses. My computing experience has never been the same since.
The GeForce2 MX GPU is winning editor awards all over the place. Happenstancilly, I found a card with it for $104, shipped: come 'n get it.
f m? Task=Vi ewProduct&SearchText=geforce2%2520mx&IdCatalog=256 0321
Slashcode won't let me insert the URL correctly; it adds spaces. Please remove the spaces from the URL after clicking on the link in order to view. Should look like this:
http://www.onvia.com/CnetShopper/products/index.c
...but how many people change cpus every 2months? ...
Well, since new 700MHz CPUs cost ~$80, my guess would be people who can afford to spend $40 a month, or roughly $1.33 a day.
(Remove space between "duro" and "n%2" to view the link.)
Since when has Celeron or Duron been low-end? (Among the x86, among all computers all x86 are low-end). My 486 is a low-end x86 and I still consider my ppro a middle-end machine - it is adequate for most tasks if I don't use latest bloatzillas and all.
It really doesn't make much sense to try and run a "high-end" video card on a slower system, even to run quake because, sure you might have beautiful graphics, but it's gonna be about 10 to 15 FPM. That's like fixing the body of your car before you even touch the engine or drivetrain that really needs the attention!
You'd look REAL good cruising down the street in a shiny car....with a trail of black smoke or loose parts behind you.
The article commented on PS2 developers struggling with programming the new hardware. This is what happened with the N64, and one reason for its lower sales compared to the PS1.
But regarding their upcoming system, Nintendo wrote, "Instead of going for the highest possible performance, which does not contribute to software development, our idea was to create a developer-friendly next generation TV game machine that maintained above-standard capabilities" (From http://www.nintendo.com/gamecube/ind ex. html)
In the end, it's all about gameplay. The graphics are just icing. This is why Starcraft still continues to sell well, despite being 2 yrs old and using 640x480 2D sprite graphics.
Rather than being the Betamax, the PS2 may be the N64 redux, while Nintendo captures the market with rapidly developed, fun games upon the 'cubes release.
The real 'X-factor', IMHO, is the X-Box (no pun intended). MS has shown savvy in which games it has produced and distributed, but many other consumer market attempts have shown less insight: no internet acceptance until late in the game, MSN, various attempts at entering the banking industry, etc.
It's going to be interesting.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Low end : Duron 800
High end : TBird 1000
I bet these big kids wax their CPU's every day, thinking it makes them faster. It brings back the uplifting gino conversations that sounded like "You suck because I drive a corvette and you drive a camaro.. camaros are for grannies".
Now I'll go mail some Ritalin to Sharky's boys.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"There's always that dilemma of whether to upgrade your CPU or your video card first. There's a useful piece that shows some of today's fastest 3D accelerators but on lower end systems like an Intel Celeron 700 and a AMD Duron 700"
/. lead-in rather missleading. Talking about low-end CPU and determining your upgrade path implies older CPUs (well, to me and obviously many others). When you read the article (as you suggest), you soon discover that the /. lead-in is wrong, with article more aligned with helping people choose a new system (high-end or value as determined by current state of the market.)
/.'s increasing sloppiness.
I think most people found the
It's just another example of
[read the subject]
1. As others have pointed out, 700 MHz is not low-end. My fastest computer, that I have ever had, is a K6-3/450. (Well, the dual Celeron 366 is kinda faster, but kinda not. It depends.)
2. Unlike what other posters have said, just because the chip makers no longer MAKE anything 700MHz doesn't mean you can't get a system with 700MHz. I bought both the K6-3 and the two Celerons this summer, new. It's called pricewatch.
So, neither is 700 MHz "low-end", nor is it even "low-end" in terms of systems you can make!
Geez. I've just been wishing and wishing for a T-Bird @ 800 Mhz... silly me, that's almost low end!
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This program XL-R8R will benchmark your system as a gaming platform (calculate framerates for different types of games), and will then connect to a database, find results from people with similar hardware, and tell you what you should expect in terms of framerate, if you were to upgrade to this or that hardware.
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Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Read the fsckink links before posting !
:)
Its's Sharky Extreme : PC : Hardware : GeForce2 GTS Performance On A Value Platform
"Value" is not "low end", is just cheaper than "high end".
You insulted my P166mmx !
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1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
As it seems everyone else it pointing out,
a celery 600 and duron anything-mhz are NOT low end.
You want to do a real story, show the performance increases from TNT, TNT2, GF, GF2 on things like
celery 300a @450
p2 400~450
K6/2-450
(god in hell, who'd have thought THESE would be low end this quickly).
And who in their right, left, or anywhere IN their minds sets the desktop to, or plays games at 16 bit?
You may as well do 8 bit monochrome.
Show me 32 bit, or don't bother doing it.
... after clicking through 20 pages of graphs that only differ in colour?
I recenly upgraded from a TNT-based video card to a GeForce2 GTS on my Pentium II based system.
The result? Q3A/Linux took a leap from 640x480x16, mid-detail and probably 20 fps to 1280x1024x32 max-detail and probably 30-50 fps.
The difference was unbelieveable; I thought that I had bought a completely new machine. I was playing Q3A with max settings at higher framerates at 1280x1024 than I had seen on Quake2 (with its 16-bit color) at 800x600.
I have no doubt that I couldn't have acheived the same kind of performance bonus had I spent the same amount of money on a new CPU.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
These guys at Sharky need a reality check. They seem to have a serious inferiority complex in claiming that a Celeron 700 or AMD Duron is low-end. I used to run Quake3, and more importantly Unreal Tournament on a P2-400 with Voodoo2 just fine. Of course I absolutely love my Celeron @ 850 with Geforce2 DDR but that's just gravy. In my case, the top-end video card made a world of difference much more noticeable than any blind cpu upgrade. The core motherboard and cpu always suffer from bloated software, while the video card has its own tweaked embedded code that's always running at full blazing speed, as long as the rest of the PC can provide the scene data fast enough to keep up. Sure, maybe getting a P3-1050 might give me 5-10 extra fps in Quake, for a 400$ pricetag, but if you spend all your hard earned simoleans on bleeding-edge hardware, you won't have a penny left to buy games =)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
someone was smokin' some rock when they posted this. The article in question is about "value" systems, not lower end ones.
right now, i own a P-III 300 and a K6-2 400. The only reason i consider these low end is because i'm a geek and more Mhz means....well, a bigger penis i guess...
Anyway....AMD K6-2/400 with a Voodoo3 3500 and 128Meg of ram plays Counter-Strike just fine...and, in the end, isn't that really all that matters?
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume