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Balc0ra@reddit

I had a Voodoo 1 on a 166 MMX. Unreal already had massive dips on large levels. So I had to upgrade for this

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ailyara@reddit

This used to be the running joke, in fact made it into Weird Al's "It's All about the Pentiums"

You say you've had your desktop for over a week?

Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique

Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great

If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

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Yeah that joke doesn't make sense anymore. My modern gaming PC has circa 2022 parts in it, but it still destroys games from 2026. It would be insane if I tried launching something from last month on my 4 year old modern PC and it told me, "lol too old."

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f00d4tehg0dz@reddit

2022 parts destroy 2026 games? Have you changed resolution and or refresh rate since 2022? For example going from 1440p 144hz to 4K 240hz definitely required upgrades on my end.

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micksterminator3@reddit

I feel like nobody is realistically running modern titles at 4k and high fps. Maybe e sports titles

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f00d4tehg0dz@reddit

Gotcha. I suppose I fall in the enthusiast build camp. For reference, eSport games are 240Hz. 4K absolutely. Otherwise, I usually do 120Hz 4K for the latest games.

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Cybrknight@reddit

Still dirty that Epic killed off the latest UT in favour of Fortnite.

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Macabre215@reddit

Wouldn't that Voodo3 be bottlenecked by that PIII 450? There were definitely faster CPUs when the Voodoo3 launched.

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Deksor@reddit

there were only two models of p3 that launched in february 1999, the 450MHz one and the 500MHz one. The voodoo 3 launched in march, then the 550MHz one launched in may, and the last one, the 600MHz one launched in august.
So at launch there was only one CPU that was faster, and for the rest of the year, only 3 other cpus showed up (I skipped the 533MHz model which launched in september)

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

Probably. That's just what I have on hand.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Lol... 1997 might have been the worst year in history to buy a new PC.

Source: Me, who dropped $3K on a Pentium 200Mhz MMX machine in 1997.

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micksterminator3@reddit

Dam I'm sorry 😐

Tech grew so quickly at the time. I recently bought three 1998 Pentium 3 builds at 450, 800, and 850mhz. They hold up way better than anything that I had as a kid. 1 year later you already had 1.5ghz Pentium 3 and 4. 3.06ghz hyper threading Pentium 4 by 2002.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

At least UT99 launches. I can't get Black & White, Warcraft III, Soldier of Fortune, or Quake III to even start on the '97 PC.

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Vinylmaster3000@reddit

Also you could still play alot of other titles like Quake I, Quake II, or any of the various late MS-DOS classics on something like a 200Mhz MMX.

I have a few co-workers who just played RTS games and older FPS titles until the 2000s. If you think about how people still play 10 year old titles like League of Legends or TF2, then I mean I can apply that same standard to 90s gamers.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Lol... not surprised, except maybe with Soldier of Fortune, as I think it used a modified Quake II engine. Although I didn't get around to playing it until I got a P4 build in late 2001.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

The latter 3 all yell at me that they can't initialize OpenGL.

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Cool_Dark_Place@reddit

Hmm... maybe running into issues with the early Voodoo card, as they technically didn't have full OpenGL support, but used something called "miniGL", which worked on games of the time (i.e. Quake, Quake II, Unreal), but is kinda spotty with later stuff. Maybe try a TNT or TNT2 card (or RIVA 128 if you want to keep it period correct)

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Ok-Oil7124@reddit

What is the hardware? UT wasn't that slow on a VooDoo Graphics and definitely not on a V2.

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Deksor@reddit

It's a voodoo 1, massive difference.

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Over-Percentage-1929@reddit

Back then, I had the 1998 PC only with Celeron 300A@450 and a Banshee and it definitely wasn't stuttering in UT at 1024x768.

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steak4take@reddit

Exactly. I am concerned how crappy the '97 and '98 PCs are running.

OP is that real hardware or emulated?

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Deksor@reddit

1997 PC seems about right to me in terms of performance, the voodoo 1 was already pretty slow for the time, especially for UT and quake 3 arena. And the speed diff between the pmmx 200 and the p2 333 is massive, it's probably close to a 2x increase in terms of IPC.

CPUs played also a massive role into the rendering, lots of processing was still done on the CPU, so I'm not surprised to hear that a celeron 300A @ 450 performs more like a P3 450 (despite a slower graphics card). The original p3 was pretty much as fast as a p2 450, which was also neck-a-neck with a celeron 300A at 450, because while it had 4x less L2 cache, it was running at the CPU's speed instead of half the cpu's speed.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

It's all real. If you have any idea why gaming performance is lower than it should be, I'd love to hear it, because I get that input a lot from people online, especially for the 1997 PC. But I don't know if something is actually wrong with my system, or if people just have rose-tinted memories about how well these games actually ran.

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agrk@reddit

For comparison, this is a '96 PC running UT:*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JJV97lwM_0

What drivers are you using? Back in the days, using the official drivers were not a given.

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to3cutter@reddit

I was on celeron 400 and Savage4 pro, which was overall crap but S3metal drivers makes a miracle with UT

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micksterminator3@reddit

I ran it recently with a GeForce 4mx 440. Ran way good! I later upgraded to a 6800gt and I don't think it supports the renderer cause it looks like shyt

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Deksor@reddit

You can display an FPS counter by going into the main menu and find "enable timedemo statistics" :D

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ChocolateSpecific263@reddit

Unreal Tournament was released on November 22, 1999.

Top-Tier CPUs in Late 1999

During the game's launch, the market was dominated by a high-stakes performance race between Intel and AMD:

Intel Pentium III:
Architecture: Katmai and the newly released Coppermine.
Clock Speeds: Generally 500 to 733 MHz. The 800 MHz version launched shortly after in December 1999.
AMD Athlon (K7):
Architecture: Orion (Slot A).
Clock Speeds: 500 to 750 MHz. During this window, the Athlon often outperformed the Pentium III in gaming benchmarks.

Budget & Mid-Range Options

Intel Celeron: Based on the Mendocino core, reaching speeds up to 533 MHz.
AMD K6-2 / K6-III: Lower-cost alternatives that were popular for upgrading older Socket 7 systems.

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thephuckedone@reddit

I no not miss when computers were growing up that fast lol. Sure it felt great when you upgraded, but as a kid/teenager I felt like I was always saving to upgrade lol.

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Vinylmaster3000@reddit

I have a 3dfx with a pentium III 350Mhz. Curious about how this plays on that...

I also have a Dimension 4100 with a 800mhz CPU and a Riva TNT2. Probably the highest possible quality you could get

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Rumlin@reddit

timedemo 1

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

Thanks. I wasn't aware UT99 had that.

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Rumlin@reddit

For a long time, this intro scene served as a benchmark for gaming PCs. The true average FPS measurement will only be available after the second round, as the command is entered during the first round.

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MrSmithlock@reddit

I talk about this game all the time and nobody i talk to knows about it. First game i ever pirated back when It was still beta

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interfluxdeux@reddit

Awesome comparison! 1999 was the first year I had a top-of-the-line gaming PC, and I played so much Unreal Tournament on that thing. 500 MHz Pentium III, TNT2 Ultra (Diamond V770 Ultra), 128 MB RAM.

I was just a kid in elementary school. I'd wanted a Voodoo card so badly throughout the late '90s, and I didn't know what the TNT2 Ultra was when we got it...I guess I got really lucky that it happened to be one of the two best GPUs available at the time, alongside the Voodoo3.

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VirginiaIsFoLovers@reddit

I remember trying so hard to make this playable in my K6-2 400 with an ATI Rage Pro video card, but hardware acceleration was actually barely better than running the software render.

Got an "old" OG Voodoo card from my friend, the type that are 3D only, PCI and have a pass thru from the 2D card. It was night and day better 😅

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Useful_Resolution888@reddit

I definitely played this on a K6-2 333 with a crappy 1mb sis video card, so it didn't need much to work.

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agrk@reddit

Pentium MMX 233 MHz, Savage 4 w. 16 MB. UE ran like a dream.

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VirginiaIsFoLovers@reddit

The Savage 4 was a sleeper but a good card/chip on the low end once the drivers matured. Well, better than ATI, at least, though that ain't saying much. S3TC I think was a major factor, and made textures in supported software look hella amazing with little performance cost and limited VRAM.

My friend had an Savage 4 in his cheap rebuilt Compaq and I remember being shocked at how well it performed, though I do remember it being a bit unstable sometimes. It had a reputation for that. I had been a bit incredulous about his claims of decent performance it until I played on his machine in person.

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VirginiaIsFoLovers@reddit

The Savage 4 was a sleeper but a good card/chip (S3TC I think was a major factor, and made textures in supported software look hella amazing with little performance cost).

My friend had an Savage 4 in his cheap rebuilt Compaq and I remember being shocked at how well it performed. I had been a bit incredulous about it until i played on his machine in person.

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VirginiaIsFoLovers@reddit

Crank that resolution down? I think that is what I had to do to get playable frame rates. Ofc, playable in the late 90s was like 25+ FPS.

You could get a little farther without hardware 3D on Intel, thanks the the superior floating point helped a lot with software rendering (but software looked kinda crap).

I remember getting my first GeForce a couple of years later (2 MX) which was no powerhouse, but wow what a difference a little time and hardware T&L made.

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Enxer@reddit

Yep. The best thing I did to my IBM Craptiva in 98/99 was put in a voodoo 2.

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fbman01@reddit

I loved the original unreal tournament, i use to play it on my old p2 350

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SpawnrLeiva@reddit

My dad (miss him alot) bought me my first PC in 1998, a Pentium II with two 3Dfx Voodoo II cards. Unreal OG was too scary for me, but when UT came out, I was just 5 years old and played every single day. UT, Nerf Arena Blast and Omikron. What a time to be alive!

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Junior_Budget_3721@reddit

I began my retro pc journey with a 233 mmx and voodoo1....I quickly realized that most 97 3dfx games would only run ok on 640x480 or not run well at all om any resolution, games from 1999 were pretty much out of the question. I then started testing the k6-2s and 3s cpus and concluded that the k62-450 is the bare minimum to have an enjoyable 3dfx experience. For games like UT99 you really need a voodoo2 SLI or voodoo 3. Voodoo 2 and 3 cards scale very well in performance with faster CPUs. For ut99, the slowest rig I use has a P3 700mhz paired with a voodoo2 sli setup. My favorite rig to play ut99 has a P4 paired to a voodoo5 (cpu is overkill but I also use that rig to play ut2004).

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AdventurousTime@reddit

I remember my mom paying like…a lot of money for a compaq but it had a solid gpu for a prebuilt. It was the same place I bought UT from.

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hremmingar@reddit

What operating system is on the 1999?

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

All 3 machines have Windows 98 SE installed on them.

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EIsydeon@reddit

Try 95 osr/2 instead on the 97 machine.

Win98 is actually a decent bit heavier on the cpu compared to 95. A great example is how on my Pentium 150 MP3’s would need to buffer to be playable whereas on win95 it played just fine.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

GeForce 2 will nuke UT99 from orbit.

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thedrunksysadmin@reddit

Moores Law in Real Life

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

That's exactly what I was trying to show.

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CartographerEvery268@reddit

Bad ass. Love it.

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ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)

UT99 is so cool.