Thief: The Dark Project — How does it run on 1998 PCs? — Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz & 3Dfx Voodoo 2
10REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!
Ever wanted to know how Thief: The Dark Project (1998, Looking Glass Studios) ran like on computers of mid-1998? Here is your chance to find out! This is the unpatched retail big box version of Thief, specifically version 1.14 (there was no version 1.00 commercially available) from December 1998. Direct3D acceleration with the 3Dfx Voodoo 2 is enabled and A3D 1.0 is enabled with the Turtle Beach Montego using hardware accelerated audio.
While I wouldn't consider this the "Crysis of 1998", Thief can still be a stressful game on processors of the time. Even with the Voodoo 2 card drawing textures and geometry via the Direct3D renderer, you will still experience slow-down from a number of scenarios. With hardware accelerated audio via the Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex AU8820) sound card, this will cause another smaller loss in performance as well.
This version (1.14) of Thief has support for sound cards supporting the A3D 1.0 API. This enables positional 3D audio with its distinctive filtering of sound sources to give the illusion of sounds appearing from all around the listener's head, including above and below (elevation filtering)! There is no DirectSound3D or EAX support in this version, but the first patch (version 1.33) did introduce proper support for these features.
Drivers used for Voodoo 2: the ones that can be found on the original Thief: The Dark Project CD-ROM. Drivers used for Turtle Beach Montego: the reference 1185 drivers for Aureal Vortex AU8820.
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard (chipset manufactured week 7 1998)
- Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
- Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card
- Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) (A3D) sound card
- 192MBs 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 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
#thiefthedarkproject #windows98 #3dfx #stealthgame #lookingglassstudios #windows95 #voodoo2 #a3d #aureal #hrtf #vga
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