Does Detail Texturing slow down a 3dfx Voodoo2 in Deus Ex?
9The answer appears to be "yes but not by much". There are situations where the extra texture layer does affect the render time but, usually, it's never by more than a couple of frames per second and it never affects playability to a particularly egregious extent. Scenarios that are already limited by the CPU's/processor's ability to keep up with 3D calculations and game logic are not impacted by the detail texturing nearly as much, if at all.
Unlike in this 800x600 footage, playing Deus Ex in a lower 640x480 resolution has a next-to-nonexistent impact on the Voodoo2's performance. Check out this unlisted video to see (mostly) the same tests in the lower resolution: • (Redundant 640x480 test) Does Detail Textu...
The detail textures, along with the diffuse/“base” texture, make up two texture layers. Seeing as how the Voodoo2 is able to draw two texels per cycle (thanks to its two texture mapping units), it's not surprising that it's able to handle the detail textures with only marginal impact to performance even at the higher 800x600 pixel resolution.
- SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS -
Operating system used: Microsoft Windows 98 (First Edition/FE)
Drivers used for Voodoo2 card: Glide 3.03.00 reference drivers (July 1999).
Drivers used for Sound Blaster Live: VXD 4.06.704 (September 1999) drivers.
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998 according to case label)
Intel 440BX chipset
Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card (2164W chip manufactured week 4 1998)
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card (old variant with dark-colored circuit board, board manufactured week 9 1998)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card (board manufactured week 21 1998)
Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound (MX100, basically) PCI sound card (manufactured around week 13 1997)
192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM (1x128MB & 1x64MB DIMM, manufactured week 42 1998 & week 11 1998)
The capturing was done with VCS (VisionRGB Capture Scaler) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into the following system: ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard, Intel Core i7-2600K CPU, 8 GBs DDR3 SDRAM, nVidia GTX 580 video card. A VGA-to-DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
Timestamps
0:00 - Test 1
0:47- Test 2
1:45 - Test 3
2:41 - Test 4
3:44 - Test 5
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