Before moving to Quake, I wanted to establish how much of a delta there was between my IBM 2168 486-DX2 66MHz turned 486-DX4 100MHz build and this Pentium-based one.
| 486 Dx2-66Mhz | 486 DX4-100Mhz | Pentium MMX 233MHz | |
|---|---|---|---|
| DOOM.EXE | 22 fps | 29 fps | 81 fps |
| FASTDOOM.EXE | 32 fps | 39 fps | 120 fps |
| DUKE3D.EXE | 10 fps | 15 fps | 90 fps |
Impressive. So much so that Duke Nukem 3D was playable-ish in 640x480 running at 23 fps!
If you want to run your own benchmark, start DOOM with
doom -timedemo demo1. Duke Nukem 3D does not have a benchmark but typing DNRATE when the game is running will show a fps counter in the upper right.
Since I had played a lot of DOOM on the 486 (and had so much fun!), I did not spend too much time on it with the Pentium. However I really wanted to give another try to Duke Nuken 3D. And damn this game is guuuud when it runs above 15 fps! The best description of it I ever read came from The Digital Antiquarian[1].
Duke Nukem 3D was a triumph of design and attitude [...].
- The Digital Antiquarian
I ended up getting sucked into it for hours and completed the whole first episode which I thought was pure gold. It is weird how memory works. To this day I can still vividly remember being stuck, 30 years go, in E1M3 (Death Row) where Duke is captured. For hours I searched where to go until I found the homage to The Shawshank Redemption.
The only problem I encountered was a crash due to the Sound Blaster Live when reverberation is involved. Of course Ken Silverman had published a tool[2] to patch DUKE3D.EXE and fix the problem.
If you missed it (like me), Apogee released Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour in 2016. It is a good remaster and I enjoyed the developer commentaries a lot.
Benchmarking Quake.
| ^ | [1] | The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1 |
| ^ | [2] | Ken Silverman's Build Engine Page |