Games the BP6 is fast enough for

[Wolfram]

Just curious... what recent games have you experienced to be still playable on a BP6?

If you have a newer video card, usually the CPU will be the bottleneck. Those with PIII/High-End-setups will of course have less trouble. But what about the common celeron user?

Think I´ll throw in my old GF2MX for testing this. For now I´m probably video vard limited with my G400...

Games (all at 640x480x16):

UT2003 - unplayable on 2x523 Celerons / Matrox G400 - fps <10
Quake3 - playable - fps ~30
CMR2 - playable - fps ~30
NFS5 - playable
NFS6 - unplayable
HALO - arguably playable... fps are ok, but no textures visible

[Derek]

Hmmm... I don't have any 3d-accelerators in my BP6 at the moment... So I would have to say unplayable to all!

[Wolfram]

Halo - has textures on the GF2MX. In exchange it´s not much faster than on the G400.

UT2003 - ist still in the 1-digit-ballpark with the GF2MX. Oops.

Max Payne 2 - runs on the G400 without any graphics glitches! And with permanent bullet time. Wow.- Almost playable on the GF2MX. But CPU limits kick in heavily.

Chrome - crashes on the G400. Almost playable at 800x600 on the GF2MX! Best one so far.

Aquamark 3 - runs flawlessly with the GF2MX! At 2 fps, though. Maximum. Didn´t get a score for it because it seemed to take hours, and while I was benching, I got a phone call and the answering machine software running in the background kicked in. Damn!

[Wolfram]

"New" video card in my BP6: Radeon 9000 ViVo

NFS Underground (I): playable (sort of) in 1024x768 (!), low detail. But still runs better on my Athlon64 / 6800 GT

Painkiller: Playable, but permanent bullet time (like Max Payne)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: playable

NFS6: now playable!

UT2004: no way. But I'll check that a last time with OpenGL. Because I found a Geforce3 (on a Dual TBred 2000+ MSI K7D) to be 50-100% faster in OpenGL, compared to DirectX. OpenGL was slower than DirectX on a Radeon 9800.

"Playable" means: You can play it and have fun, even with slow framerates in the ~20fps ballpark.


bonus track:

Kingpin: Extremely playable, still love this game, especially "real mode" deathmatch.

[hugoc]

They're not that recent anymore, but Serious Sam 1 and 2 were both perfectly playable with a BP6 and 32MB GeForce DDR, even at up to 1024*768. Great fun too.

[the_flames]

Warcraft 3 was playable of the BP6 with a geforce2

[wickie]

2x433@520 512 MB, GF2 MX400, 32 MB
Quake3 - 1024x768 ~ 75 fps

have not tried Far Cry or HL2 on it - i think its useless (DirectX 9 hardware support is essential for the new 3D shooters)

Far Cry needs at least a 2 GHz CPU and a GF FX-5600 with 128 MB to run at 50 fps or more.

When i find a inexpensive passive cooled FX-5600 for my Athlon XP, i will try the FX-5200 with the BP-6 maybe its enough for 800 x 600.

[loophole]

I found that NFS Hot Pursuit 2 was playable as were both NOLF games (1 and 2) with my Winfast Geforce 256 SDR card.

Just got a 64MB Radeon 8500 but haven't had time to try it yet.

I also found Quake 3 Arena was playable (and actually faster under Linux ), benched around 60 - 70fps at 1024 x 768 16bit.

[phaedrus]

Quake 3 Arena is great on the ol' BP6. Just remember to pull down the console, enter "set r_smp 1" and then restart the game. Much better, no?

I've been playing Quake 1 recently, with transparent water and high quality, I can get 36-70 fps (there are some spots where the water vissing really slows down the engine, but with my GF4 Ti4200, I've got no problem with them).

Even with the dual PIII mod and a GF4 Ti4200, Tenebrae isn't playable. Any of you who have faster machines and fond memories of Quake 1, I strongly suggest you check it out. And hey, maybe someone will go through and multithread it (they link to the pthread library in the linux makefiles, but they haven't added anything in the source files... alas).

Jeff

[Wolfram]

Far Cry runs on my BP6 / Radeon 9000 combo. Singleplayer is in the 15fps ballpark (low settings, of course), multiplayer (monkeybay) as well.

Half-Life 2 loads only the menu level, at ~5 fps. Crashes when I try to start a regular game (visual c++ error).

Doom3 crashes on startup (unknown exception).

[Wolfram]

GTA Vice City: Playable, to my surprise, with the Radeon 9000. In 1024x768x32. Was unplayable with my old Matrox G400. Now it's in the 20fps ballpark, but acceptable for me, I mean, I would actually play it with that computer if I had no faster machine. The box boasts a 800 MHz (PIII or Athlon!) minimum requirement

[BCN]

on BP6 with GF3 MX was playable well at 640*480

Q3
NOLF 1 and 2, NFS Hot pursuit, serious sam, civ3

[phaedrus]

Doom3! w00t! (kinda, read on)

I had to satisfy myself that my computer couldn't run Doom3, so I downloaded the demo. Well, it plays and it doesn't. It's a little bit jerky, but when there isn't much going on, it's pretty good. When things pick up, it's still playable (sorry, I didn't check fps). So far, I've played just far enough to reach the scientist and blow away the first couple of bad guys (yeah, I know, not very far).

Here's what I did to get this to work as much as it did. I'm running on my system with the dual PIII 866s@650MHz, 384 MB of RAM and a GF4/Ti4200. I'm still running Slack 10.0 (I've got my 10.1 disks but have had no time to upgrade). I've trimmed down my system so that a minimum of daemons are running, I'm running a custom compiled & optimized kernel, and I'm running Doom3 as my windowmanager in X (I boot to command line and start X by hand, it gives me a lot of flexibility, like switching between the open source drivers and nVidia's drivers--more stability vs. 3d accel trade off). And finally, I'm running Doom3 on the lowest quality settings possible (which are still gorgeous).

The big problem I'm having is that it is hideously unstable. It segfaults pretty regularly. I got to the scientist by saving after just about every door and restarting when it crashed (took some patience). This might be because I'm still running the 2.6.7 kernel (driver related--I had some problems getting the nVidia drivers to play nice with 2.6.10, and gave up after fighting with it for a few hours, I might have to give it another go). There's a known issue with 2.6.9 and Doom3, and 2.6.7 likely has the same problem.

I think the trick is that Doom3 is multithreaded (watch the console output sometime). The other trick is that I'm running under Linux (cut down to a minimum at that). Check this out, specifically, the minimum specs a little way down the page. Then compare them to the minimum specs over at the main Doom3 site or at id Software's site, primarily the CPU MHz and RAM requirements. I periodically see people ask why one would want to game under Linux. This is why.

If I can just get my FSB up, dual 866s probably qualify as minimum system reqs. Time to go order a new set of caps.

Jeff

[Atropos]

Hi there,

original Quake runs rock stable on my BP6 with dual 433 MHz Celi.
The graphics board is a viper V330 (TNT chipset) which does not
require extra cooling. (There's not fan and even no heatsink)...

I'm running glQuake and the "Killer Quake Pack" which is IMHO the
best pack for classic Quake out there. Tons of new weapons and
the built-in bots (especially the Cujo -dog -bot) really rock.
I love the game.

Bye,
Atropos

[KliK]

with Hercules Prophet 4500 TV-out with 64MB VRAM & Kyro2 chipset:


Star Trek: Armada 1 & 2 - flowlessly

Star Trek: Elite Force 1 & 2 - flawlessly...some stalling in game in second sequel, but it's very playable...also EF1 works great with 2xVoodoo2 (connected with SLI cable)

Star Wars: Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast & Jedi Academy - work great...had no problems during the game...

Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb - work great!

IL2 & IL2 Forgoten Battles with Ace pack - works with some little stalls...but I wouldn't recomend the Pacific Fighters!

NFS: Underground 1 & 2 - works with 2 or 3 fps...so it's unplayable!

Risk 2 - good and playable

Star Wars: KotOR 1 & 2 - works...but hardly playble!!!

Delta Force (all) - playablče and great!

Mafia - works, but sometimes a little slow...about 25fps +-3

GTA: Vice City - works great...even with add-on pack and new cars!

Carmageddon TDR2000 - work great...some stalling if you put new cars in, but that is some serious tweaking the game...also is fun to ride the KnightRider!!!

Master of Orion 1,2 & 3 - works great!

Heroes of Might & Magic - works great!

Star Trek: Bridge Commander - work fine...a little stalls, but work with over 30fps...

Civilization 2, 3 & 4 - works fine!

Settlers 3 - works fine!

Alpha Centauri - works fine!



also on ePSXemu with 2x Voodoo2 connected with SLI cabel:

GT 1 & 2 - work as fast as on PSX...but with high grafics!!!

[Jordan]

On my box (2 400's at 600MHz with ATI rage fury 32meg) I can run pretty much any game made before 1998 on high settings at usually 800x600 or higher. Ie: Sin, Heretic 2, Unreal Tournament, Quake 2 (probably Q3, but i don;t have it yet)

Also, it runs Daikatana, Duke Nukem MAnhattan project, and every single Doom based port/game ever made. (execpt doom 3)

I think the newest most bestest game i can play is GTA3, which is just barely playable. If i find my Vice city discs, i think it can run it too.
I wish it could run Half-life 2, because i bought the collector's edition box right before the stores here stopped selling them. IT just sits there, begging to be played. (I have no money for a new PC.)
Anyway, that's what i play on my BP6. I know most of them are crap, but they were entertaining at some time.

-EDIT/Update -

I just got my hands on Quake 3 GOLD (ooh, yes) and GTA Vice City.
Q3 runs SO fast (comparatively).
Average of 40-50 fps, tops of 90.
Everything to max except 16 bit colours and 800x600.

GTA-VC runs alright, much better than GTA3. It's playable and fun, now that i fixed all my IRQ sharings that caused the most weirdest graphical anomalies i ever saw...

Anyhoo, good stuff for a machine thats WAY out of date!