Outcast (400x300): How does it run on 1999 PCs? — Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz & nVidia Riva TNT
4HAPPY 25TH ANNIVERSARY, OUTCAST!
REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Around 25 years ago, the Belgian game development team Appeal and publisher Infogrames unleashed Outcast 1.0 upon this world for Windows 95 and 98 computers. The world thus became a better place because of it.
How did this awesome piece of software run on computers of that time? If you really cranked those settings up it certainly had its fair share of performance bumps, to put it lightly. In this video, we will explore how exactly it ran in a few scenarios on an Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz processor with every single performance setting dialed up to its limit at a resolution of 400x300 (second only to the highest 512x384 resolution). With both MMX and SSE SIMD instruction extensions present on the Pentium III, the best possible performance could be achieved on the highest settings in Outcast (which was one of the first games to make use of SSE instructions) compared to all processors available when Outcast was new. FRAPS is used to display the frame-rate in each scenario we test.
The computer used to run Outcast in this video is configured as a typical early Pentium III might have been configured around February (if I had an even older Pentium III sample) or March 1999, especially if someone had swapped out the CPU on a mid-1998 440BX motherboard back then. This is why I only have a Riva TNT and not a more recent video card relative to when Outcast first came out (June 1999). Not that a faster 3D card would speed things up by any notable degree, seeing as how Outcast is entirely software-rendered. Seriously, the game features beautiful use of Bump/Normal Mapping on characters and water, including Environment Mapping mixed with the bump-mapping (all done on the CPU alone)! 3D cards need not apply, as they are irrelevant here.
The Pentium III 500 would have been a very high-end CPU around the time of Outcast's release, but it wasn't the top-of-the-line part (Pentium III 550 says "hi"). Still, it handles Outcast just fine (all things considered) and is the second-highest performance settings profile offered in the game's launcher, only behind the P3 550/64MB+ option. I would have used a 550 Mhz part if I could (recently acquired a relatively early SL3F7 sample from week 18 1999), but my 440BX board doesn't support a 550 Mhz clock. Would need a 440BX-2 for that.
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Compaq Deskpro EP 6400 case and motherboard (manufactured July 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard
- Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL365, manufactured week 10 1999)
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Riva TNT (CT6710) video card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value (CT4670) sound card
- 128 MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM
- Windows 98 (FE) operating system
The capturing was done in VirtualDub2 using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA cable is connected between the vintage 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 ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 800x600 (a nice multiple of Outcast's 400x300) capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
Timestamp table:
0:00 - Talanzaar
4:44 - Motazaar
8:13 - Shamazaar
9:47 - Okasankaar
12:13 - Okaar
15:23 - (BONUS) Kroax’s Sexy Bumpy Booty
#outcast #pentium3 #windows98 #appeal #fraps #rivatnt #periodcorrect #realhardware #softwarerendering #25thanniversary #vga #datapath #upscaling
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