Digital Foundry Retro Discussion [2016 - 2017]

[Davros]

The first AAA killer game to be a FPS on console.

Wasnt that GoldenEye ?

 

[bunge]

Fix this whole Hall of Fame issue by calling the category "DOOM Clones" instead of "FPS".

 

[BRiT]

Fix this whole Hall of Fame issue by calling the category "DOOM Clones" instead of "FPS".

You mean Wolfenstein Clones?

 

[Riddlewire]

You mean Wolfenstein Clones?

You mean MIDI Maze clones?

 

[bunge]

You mean Wolfenstein Clones?

Nah. There were other "FPS" games than that, too. DOOM is just the start of the genre in my opinion. The rest were still finding their way.

Besides, if you couldn't detect any sarcasm in my post there was some.

 

[Cyan]

New article focused on Quake 2. Especial mention for the Xbox 360 version, the author says, because "Quake 2 delivers - quite possibly - the single cleanest image output we've seen on the Xbox 360". The game runs at native 1080p 60fps on the X360 with 4x MSAA and AFx16, which is quite the feat taking into account the console was totally knew when the port was launched at X360's launch date as part of the disk with Quake 4.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...e-2-on-xbox-360-the-first-console-hd-remaster

My old Diamond 3DFX graphics card appears in the video at the 2:38 mark btw. It's curious that even today. almost 12 years later, 1080p 60fps is a rarity on consoles.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's sadly not as pretty. Enabling post effects on my mobile game drops framerate from 60 to 30. 60 fps is far nicer for playability, but the game is prettier with post effects, especially important for screenshots and PR. That'll be true no matter what console generation you pick and the situation won't improve any in future.

 

[Davros]

@Cyan
If your going to replay quake 2 get the eraser bot
you may also want to use quake 2 xp along with the bzb bot
http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-2-xp

And of course no quake related post is complete without

edit: i beleive the eraser bot is difficult to install on 64bit systems

 

[HMBR]

last time I played Q2 for a decent amount of time was using a P2 400 + Voodoo 2 8MB, performance was pretty good, so seeing that Voodoo1 footage was kind of painful and I had to check,
here is a reference comparing it to other 3dfx cards and yes, V2 was 3X faster

considering the V2 was release only 3 months after the game and could deliver smooth performance, I think it would be more representative, or something like the Riva 128 (available when the game was launched)

that V1 footage at 640x480 makes the PC version looks worse than needed, with that level of 3d cards it would be more appropriate to run at lower res.

 

[Davros]

why didnt he benchmark the V2 at 800x600 ?

 

[Cyan]

@Cyan
If your going to replay quake 2 get the eraser bot
you may also want to use quake 2 xp along with the bzb bot
http://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-2-xp

And of course no quake related post is complete without

edit: i beleive the eraser bot is difficult to install on 64bit systems

thanks, the PC experience is endless. I have Quake 2, had it when it came out and have it now on Steam because of a good offer to get Bethesda games like Quake and TES and Doom at a very good price. I used to play Deathmatch with the Reaper bot that I got from a PC magazine, it's not surprising at all that Steve Polge -iirc-, the Reaper's bot author got hired by Epic iirc. Reaper bot was a lot of fun to play against ! It was better in some maps than in others, but the great thing about it was that the more he played against you in a map the better it got in that map.

The bot used some kind of technique that created paths from the player's movement so when you were running around the map the bot was learning.

 

[Cyan]

For those who want to keep their entire library of retro games organised by platform and so on, I'd wholeheartedly recommend Launchbox.(Hyperspin is incredible, for instance, but I fear installing it because virustotal.com always give me positives when checking the files, so I prefer not to risk it)

It works very well and most importantly, it's made for retro games of any retro system (N64, SNES, MAME etc), also MS-DOS games, but it imports your Steam and GoG library too! So it's perfect to keep your entire library perfectly organised.

https://www.launchbox-app.com/

(video says it all)

Screenshot of its interface with the 14 GoG games -out of 190 I have- I downloaded as of late.

 

[Allandor]

last time I played Q2 for a decent amount of time was using a P2 400 + Voodoo 2 8MB, performance was pretty good, so seeing that Voodoo1 footage was kind of painful and I had to check,
here is a reference comparing it to other 3dfx cards and yes, V2 was 3X faster

considering the V2 was release only 3 months after the game and could deliver smooth performance, I think it would be more representative, or something like the Riva 128 (available when the game was launched)

that V1 footage at 640x480 makes the PC version looks worse than needed, with that level of 3d cards it would be more appropriate to run at lower res.

I played this game with a V1 and a P200 and it ran like a charm. They must have benched something wrong. It may not ever reached 60fps but it was well over 30fps without those dips.
Like most games of that time, Q2 scales well with the cpu. maybe they used a really old cpu for the tests.
btw, Unreal (the first one) also ran on V1 cards like a charm.

The Riva 128 was a really really bad card, or at least the drivers. After a few minutes playing Q2 the memory was always full on those cards. Also the V1 was much faster than the Riva 128.

 

[Davros]

The Riva 128 also had this sort of grainy image quality

 

[Deleted member 11852]

The Riva 128 also had this sort of grainy image quality

It was ahead of it's time with its built-in film grain effect.

I had a motherboard mounted Riva 128 in my first PC and never experienced this. Sounds like back DACs.

 

[AlNom]

Probably just lower precision filtering/rendering? I sort of remember Voodoo looking smoother at the time.

edit: heh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_128#Image_Quality

 

[HMBR]

I played this game with a V1 and a P200 and it ran like a charm. They must have benched something wrong. It may not ever reached 60fps but it was well over 30fps without those dips.
Like most games of that time, Q2 scales well with the cpu. maybe they used a really old cpu for the tests.
btw, Unreal (the first one) also ran on V1 cards like a charm.

The Riva 128 was a really really bad card, or at least the drivers. After a few minutes playing Q2 the memory was always full on those cards. Also the V1 was much faster than the Riva 128.

the digital foundry footage was using a PII 350, so not really a problem, P200 was a little bit on the slow side for Q2 I think, you would notice a difference for the PII, at least with a Voodoo 2, not sure with a Voodoo 1.

it's difficult to get some good info on 1997 hardware at this point, but I see some tests with the Riva128 not doing to badly on Q2, and that youtube video certainly is performing decently, but that's with the benefit of a CPU from 2001 and newer drivers... anyway, the numbers I find for the Voodoo 1 on other sources are not to far from the ones on that video comparing all those 3dfx cards

 

[BRiT]

From what I remember of my own systems at the time... My experience mirrors Allandor's. These retro systems are very much flawed in using cpus not available until 4 years later.

The Riva128 was very much the lesser card at the time. The Riva128 was very dependent on cpu. If you swapped in a Riva128 in place of a 3dfx Voodoo card on a typical system you would see lower framerates unless you did extensive cpu upgrade to get the performance back up to where it was with a Voodoo card.

 

[Cyan]

From what I remember of my own systems at the time... My experience mirrors Allandor's. These retro systems are very much flawed in using cpus not available until 4 years later.

The Riva128 was very much the lesser card at the time. The Riva128 was very dependent on cpu. If you swapped in a Riva128 in place of a 3dfx Voodoo card on a typical system you would see lower framerates unless you did extensive cpu upgrade to get the performance back up to where it was with a Voodoo card.

Voodoo cards were usually unrivaled til Voodoo 3 days, I think, when their decline began. Even in the Voodoo 3 days I had 2 GPUs, the Voodoo 3 PCI and the Matrox G400. The G400 made games look better with its 32bits colour. Colour banding was eliminated in Quake 3 with the G400 and it was the first GPU to feature bump mapping, afaik.

Despite that and the fact that my Voodoo 3 card only displayed games at 16 bits, the games that supported Glide literally flied compared to how they ran in my G400, much much slower, like 20fps vs 60fps (Voodoo 3).

In fact it created conflicting feelings in my mind. I preferred Direct3D over Glide because it was less niche, and the games looked okay with Direct3D, plus the G400 had 32MB of RAM compared to the 16MB of RAM of my Voodoo 3, so the games had better textures on my Matrox G400, not to mention the 32 bits colour..

The DualHead feature was also nice for people with more than one screen, it had a very wide 256bits bus, it seemed to be a great performer, but in my case it wasn't .

Reason being it didn't matter how good the games looked by comparison, the framerate advantage of the Voodoo 3 was so huge that I remember switching GPUs constantly --despite one being a PCI card and the other a AGP card, blue screens were common if you plugged both in the mobo-. That was a time of continuous opening and closing my PC's case. In the end, the G400 is the most unused GPU I've ever had. Which was a PITA because it was a expensive GPU but the performance wasn't there --compared to my humble Voodoo3 PCI 2000.

 

[Cyan]

New DF Retro article featuring Soul Calibur. Played the Sould Edge version -PS1- at my best friend's house around 1998-99, I think?

I was totally impressed and the game was soooo good, the spectacular intro and the game's gameplay was nearly flawless. Perhaps the fighting game that impressed me the most ever, after Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, which was released before.

Then Dead or Alive 3 on the Xbox impressed me again -not only 'cos of the grahics - and I can't recall a fighting game that looked so good afterwards. If anything Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD for the X360 looked very nice to me, art style too.