Unreal: How it runs on a 1998 PC — Pentium II 400 MHz / 3Dfx Voodoo 2 / Turtle Beach Montego — Glide
10REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
This time it's all about demonstrating how that Pentium II 400 and single Voodoo 2 card handled Unreal with Glide (API) around the time of the game hitting retail stores. We will see how several scenarios across most of the single player campaign's levels impact system performance. It won't be a smooth ride because that's just how demanding Unreal Engine 1 was!
Unreal isn't commonly referred to as a "Crysis of 1998" (or at least for the first half of it) for nothing. With large vistas and occasionally busy indoor and outdoor scenes you are bound to find spots that cut the frame-rate into fractions of itself! Shiny/reflective surfaces will always have its way with game speed, especially when enemies are involved. Do you like volumetric fog? In that case you have to put up with a nice frame-rate penalty as well, and even more so with multiple layers of fog! There are some truly nasty performance-killing spots in many indoor areas, sometimes for reasons that are fairly baffling to me (the room where you find the Bio Rifle is another one that I forgot to capture). I won't cry "bad optimization", although the Unreal Engine has had performance issues more than once in history (UT2003, I'm looking at you).
Since the very first version of Unreal doesn't have a built in timedemo or frames-per-second (fps) feature I decided to use the "stat hardware" and "stat fps" commands to show the polygons- and milliseconds-per-frame (ppf and mpf) on screen. It's somewhat easy to get an idea of how MSEC translates to frame-rate knowing that 16.666(...) milliseconds = 60 frames/sec. and 33.333(...) milliseconds is half of that (30 fps). Not sure how accurate the 3D stats really are but the SURFS (most likely surfaces), TRIS (triangles, I assume) and POLY values do increase with larger scene complexity. The variables next to the frame and render MSEC variables correspond to variables on the upper half of the screen (NODES = POLY and POLYS = SURFS). Not sure what's up with that.
This is version 200 of Unreal, the original CD-ROM version without patches installed. 3Dfx Glide works wonderfully but not Aureal A3D support, which was broken and unpleasant to listen to out-of-the-box. Therefore, no hardware 3D audio acceleration is used in this footage. All the reverb and echo effects you hear are software-rendered on the CPU as this version does not support Creative EAX effects and the Sound Blaster Live!
Drivers used for the Voodoo 2 card: Glide 2.51 reference drivers (April 23 1998).
Drivers used for the Turtle Beach Montego sound card: don't remember exactly, other than that they were from around late May or June '98.
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 motherboard (all board components are manufactured before April 30th 1998)
Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card (manufactured somewhere in Q1 1998, don’t exactly remember)
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card (old variant with dark-colored circuit board, maybe manufactured around March or April 1998, don't remember)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card (manufactured around August 1998, don't remember exactly)
Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) (A3D) sound card (manufactured around March or April 1998, don't remember, need to check again dammit!)
192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM (all DIMMs manufactured around 1998, some earlier and some later in the year probably)
The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio 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 (basically, using my 2011 “vintage” PC). A VGA 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 ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 — Flyby/Nali Castle
3:55 — NyLeve’s Falls
6:08 — Depths of Rrajigar
8:44 — Dark Arena
12:19 — Terraniux Underground
14:15 — Spire Village
15:44 — Loading time demonstration
15:51 — The Sunspire
17:32 — Gateway to Na Pali/Na Pali Haven
21:39 — Outpost 3J
#unreal #unrealengine1 #unreal1998 #timsweeney #epicmegagames #epicgames #digitalextremes #windows95 #3dfx #voodoo2 #glide #3dacceleration #matrox #millennium2 #turtlebeach #montego #datapath #upscaling #gamecapture #videocapture #640x480 #SVGA #bilinearfiltering #CliffBleszinski #periodcorrect #pentium2 #intelprocessor
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