Well, Mr Rho FINALLY decided to take the plunge, and now is the proud owner of a 
Geforce 2 MX, rock on !! So thanx to me, he is now comfortably beating me in Quake2 benchmarks ! Read on to see if there is any difference in the other games !

Ok, there is a new benchmark that I want to put up, so can the regulars please download the following program : 
SiSoft Sandra 2001, 
so that the new figures can be put up, don't worry its only a 2 megs

These Benchmarks, will move to their own pages later, accompanied by graphs. I am busy trying out various packages to see whose graphs look the most appealing. At the moment I am leaning towards graphs that resemble firingsquad type graphs. I find that they aren't to big, and convey the message pretty succinctly.

Index :
- HOME
- System Setup

rants and raves :

Seeing that 3dfx is no more, you will be needing driver updates. Seeing that I am not currently busy with that, here are some links to ppl that are making them.

1. Tempest(the best I think)

Overclocking Gigabyte:
Just in case you were wondering what overclocking program I was using to overclock my Thunderbird, it is EasyTune III, but not the one I received from the CD of the motherboard, cause that one don't work. I had to download a newer version from Gigabytes web site. (just by the way, the Taiwan site SUCKS !!) rather go to the american one :
gigabyte.(MUCH faster)
One web site said that they could only overclock the chip to the recommended overclock, which 842 MHz, but I managed to push mine to 900 MHz (It was a rainy day, so my room was nice and cool, seeing that it is summer here in Cape Town now, I can only get up to 888 MHz)
 

Norton 2000

The Geforce does not affect this benchmark at all, it doesn't take your video subsystem into account at all!
For this benchmark, the CPU and motherboard, play an important role. The amount and speed of the RAM does not seem to play much part, cause the numbers stayed the same for my machine when switching between 100 and 133 MHz. The only reason I can think of for the poor performance of the PIII 866, is the relatively unknown motherboard maker.

Now for some game benchmarks: Some of these games are a bit old, but they are still enjoyable.

GL Hexen 2

Try this to get GL to work, delete or rename the opengl32.dll file in the HexenII folder, so that it will use the one located in the windows directory, I completely forgot that that the opengl32 file was written specifically for Voodoo, hence the error if u try and start it without having voodoo hardware.

Hexen 2 has 2 different modes in which you can play the game, either software, or in GL mode. Well now we have the NV11 but he is also having trouble with GLmode, they all seem to be looking for a GLIDE file, this is a driver problem. There should be some kind of download able so that it will work. Rho if you read this before I have a chance to go to the site, pop over here to look for the file you might need(scope out there download section, Level u might want to as well).  At the moment nothing can even come close to the performance of the Voodoo 2, not even non SLI mode! (please note that this is a relative comment, pertaining to the video cards represented here ! ). I was expecting more from the TNT2 M64 though. Strangely enough even he had some troubles with GL mode. The NV11 gained some ground, but unfortunately this benchmark is still unbalanced, the numbers for the 600 are still in software.

GL Quake 2

Here the 266@400 MHz beats the 866 PIII. Strange because they have the same video card. Level G made an observation that his video RAM is running @ 160 MHz and that of the 866 is @ 130 MHz. I was a bit reluctant to believe that 30 extra MHz would  make that much of a difference, but there you go (I personally believe it to be a driver issue). The numbers that I got for the 800 machine, were taken with enhanced dll's for 3DNOW instructions. (Only fair seeing that Quake 3 has built in SSE support), but that still could not stop the NV11 from marching on. I was there when the timedemos was running, man it was demoralizing ! While it was running (for that split second !!) I new my record was on its way out ! So for the first time Voodoo2 combined with the Athlon 800 sees the ass of 600&NV11 finish first ;(
*The graphics issues with 1024 and SLI still persist, but please take note, SLI CAN run in 1024, but non SLI CANNOT !

I think I will try and overclock my machine to get that lead back, after all it just 15 fps ;)
**the dumb ass was just to lazy to run at that resolution !

Unreal Tournament

Well here the huge gap can be expected, not due to the fact of K7 dominance, but because the Unreal Engine was built for GLIDE specifically. (If you can remember when Voodoo 3 was released, the game was bundled with the card) Even with the 32 MB of the TNT's, they don't even come close.

Ok so no more software mode here, all in 3d mode, so apples to apples. I will put up a table later to compare the 32 bit scores, cause these were all taken in 16 bit (voodoo cannot do 32 bit ;( ..... yeah yeah, I will get a new card. Now what 3dfx do with all those extra Voodoo5's they took off the shelf's , hmmm)

For the first time non SLI beats SLI by quite a couple of frames, I will have to redo this one a couple of times just to make sure of this result.(Its just that I have been having trouble creating demos with the UT, they don't seem to be recording properly)
= Note to Ralph, to due to your extreme slowness (hehe) you are not represented in some of the benchmarks !
 

MDK2

The first time I played this game, my jaws literally fell to the ground ! The graphics in this game are amazing, and plays like a dream with a good dose of humour for good measure. There are quite a few ppl that did not like the first game, and sadly it was just because it was a 3rd person game, dumb ass , but there u go ! They sure did miss out on a rather special game. But all is not lost, the game is now selling for R99.00 at GAME so now there is no reason for u to own your own copy. I whole heartedly recommend it, mostly cause it has glide support, but there is a D3D patch as well. I will be making a "review" of that game as well.

Back to MDK2, this game has it all, and a rather nifty timedemo goody as well. You just click a button, no typing required for all those lazy and inept folks ;)
Try and get hold of the demo folks and send me the numbers, here are some to compare for now with the K7 800 machine.