Thief (software renderer): How it runs on a 1998 PC — Pentium II 400 MHz / Aureal Vortex 2 (A3D)
9REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Oh, hey, I'm covering Thief: The Dark Project (Looking Glass Studios/Eidos Interactive, December 1998) again, only this time using the software rendering mode (i.e. "hardware off" mode)! The game ran without too many remarkable hiccups with the Voodoo2 card but how does it fare without using any 3D accelerator/GPU at all? That's what the video will attempt to answer.
This version of Thief: The Dark Project being captured is the original unpatched (version 1.14) retail CD-ROM version, directly from the disc. This means that there is no EAX support, which was added in the first 1.33 patch. Unlike the sequel, using a Sound Blaster Live is somewhat pointless in the retail version because of this (positional audio IS more precise on Aureal A3D cards, after all).
- HOW IT RUNS -
Without the benefit of a Direct3D-compatible graphics accelerator installed, Thief now has to perform all the geometric and texture drawing on the CPU instead. This will naturally result in a generally less fluid performance across the board. That said, the game runs fairly well even at the higher 640x480 resolution (which is strenuous for software rendering standards of '98) on the Pentium II 400. Things that caused disproportionate amounts of slow-down (such as exploding zombies, belching gas from burricks, polygonally dense environments etc.) in hardware mode on the Voodoo2 still contribute to frame-rate deficits in much the same way, albeit a bit more so.
- GAME SETTINGS -
See the start of the video for details on video and audio settings used in this footage. On the Vortex 2 control panel side, I used the Headphones audio output setting for playback. Because of this, it may not sound entirely optimal if you're listening to this video using a speaker setup.
- SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS -
Operating system used: Microsoft Windows 98 (First Edition/FE)
Drivers used for Matrox Millennium II: Matrox PowerDesk 4.21 (September 1998)
Drivers used for Aureal Vortex 2/Turtle Beach Montego II: Vortex AU8830 4.05.2000 drivers (September 1998)
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)
Turtle Beach Montego II (Aureal Vortex 2 AU8830) sound card (board manufactured week 37 1998)
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 - Main menu/Settings
0:14 - Lord Bafford's Manor
4:23 - Down In The Bonehoard
7:38 - Assassins
11:07 - The Sword
14:29 - The Lost City
16:28 - Undercover
#thief #thief1 #lookingglassstudios #darkengine #thedarkproject #softwarerendering #windows98 #aureal #a3d #vortex2 #hrtf #binaural #periodcorrect #datapath #upscaling #gamecapture #4by3 #4x3 #pentium2 #matrox #millennium2
Software mode portal-and-cell renderer by Sean Barrett, the rest of the Dark Engine (sound, characters, objects, scripting etc.) is courtesy of other programmers at Looking Glass Studios.
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