Soldato
A couple of weeks back when it rained all week I didn't have much to do so I thought I'd benchmark my two ISA cards - my "slow" Trident and my "fast" AVGA 2. Naturally it expanded to benchmarking a wide range of cards at several CPU speeds...
The Cards
Trident 9000C 512K
Acumos AVGA2 (basically a CL-GD5422) 512K
STB Lightning 128 (basicall a Tseng 6000) 2Mb
Voodoo 3 2000 16Mb
ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8Mb
3Dlabs Permedia 2 4Mb
Nvidia TNT 2 M64 32Mb
Nvidia TNT 2 Pro 16Mb
GeForce 3 ti200 64Mb(?)
GeForce 4 MX 440 64Mb
The Benchmarks
I used the DosBench facility that Phil's computer lab put together and only tested the high settings version of benches as there so was so little variation between cards for the low settings. High generally means 640* 480. "Quake Medium" is some obscure 340*280 res or something, because I couldn't get 640 to run on any of the cards, even on my shareware Quake.
I tested at 4.5*100 450MHz, 8.0*100 800MHz and 8.0 *112 896MHz. The 896MHz test overclocks the AGP, PCI and ISA buses a bit too.
What I learned
Last up I tried Doom at 800 * 600 to see if this would push the cards a bit more (or if it would all be CPU related). I was bored and only benchmarked 800MHz at this point
You don't need me to describe a graph to you but the Voodoo and STB lightning both seemed to run out of steam? PCI Bandwidth? Something else? I am also not sure why the Rage was so bad either, it seemed fairly hit and miss over the course of the benchmarking.
The Cards
Trident 9000C 512K
Acumos AVGA2 (basically a CL-GD5422) 512K
STB Lightning 128 (basicall a Tseng 6000) 2Mb
Voodoo 3 2000 16Mb
ATI Rage Pro Turbo 8Mb
3Dlabs Permedia 2 4Mb
Nvidia TNT 2 M64 32Mb
Nvidia TNT 2 Pro 16Mb
GeForce 3 ti200 64Mb(?)
GeForce 4 MX 440 64Mb
The Benchmarks
I used the DosBench facility that Phil's computer lab put together and only tested the high settings version of benches as there so was so little variation between cards for the low settings. High generally means 640* 480. "Quake Medium" is some obscure 340*280 res or something, because I couldn't get 640 to run on any of the cards, even on my shareware Quake.
I tested at 4.5*100 450MHz, 8.0*100 800MHz and 8.0 *112 896MHz. The 896MHz test overclocks the AGP, PCI and ISA buses a bit too.
What I learned
- (My) ISA cards unsurprisingly don't benefit from faster CPUs. However, when the FSB was increased a bit, the AVGA2 seemed to benefit *a bit* from the wider bus.
- The Trident can't play Doom
- The AVGA2 can technically play Quake (it was also very playable at 320*240)
- Quake loves MHz
- Doom at very low frame rates isn't like modern games at low frame rates, it's like a smooth slide show.
- The FSB increase of 12MHz (and extra 96MHz) generally offered nearly as much performance increase as a 350MHz / 77% CPU speed increase
- The Permedia 2 loved the PCPlayer bench - not sure if the card has something that PC Player specifically needs?
- STB Lightning was surprisingly fast
- The Voodoo was surprisingly weak
- No cards had any compatibility issues
- Don't do long winded and boring projects like this
Last up I tried Doom at 800 * 600 to see if this would push the cards a bit more (or if it would all be CPU related). I was bored and only benchmarked 800MHz at this point
You don't need me to describe a graph to you but the Voodoo and STB lightning both seemed to run out of steam? PCI Bandwidth? Something else? I am also not sure why the Rage was so bad either, it seemed fairly hit and miss over the course of the benchmarking.