For those wondering why the CPU has such a huge impact on the framerate even with a 3D accelerator, it's important to remember that these early 3D accelerators only implemented a hardware rasterizer, i.e. they could draw triangles on the screen with texture mapping and gouraud shading. That's about it. All of the 3D transformation math still had to be done on the CPU, meaning that the more polygons you had in the scene, the more work the CPU had to do. This made that early 3D accelerated games were still very heavily CPU bound. This didn't change until the first GeForce card introduced Hardware Transform & Lighting, with which the 3D math could be delegated to the GPU.
The antialiasing test and maybe also the 3Dfx logo animation may be good examples of what you are explaining. T&L was definitely a huge advancement which helped nVidia to finally and undisputedly pull ahead of the competition - to the detriment of 3dfx.
That wasnt initial attempt. It's just first mass PC api with this feature. Famous GTE polygon jitter bug in PS1 says exactly about it's presence ) One of earlier 3d accelerator apis also featured such transforms, but cant just remember exact which one.
@@Thomsonicus PowerVR in SGL mode allows use of hardware transforms AFAIR. But there is not much games with NATIVE powervr support. Fortunately, TR supports PowerVR in any generation of its time, but was it native or something like d3d - idk.
Yes! This is the power of Voodoo, even on slower CPUs it really makes a difference! It's a real shame the top Cyrix has bugged features, it has a lot of potential...
Hought the amd dx4120 was the fastest & was surprised to see the Cyres results. I know they had the best fpu at 1 point so it could be the reason it did so well . Great video well presented & very enlightening . Thanks
@@bitsundbolts I might have missed this in previous videos but do we know why so many features were disabled on these chips? I remember they got panned hard in reviews etc and as you have noted they didn't even last a year on the market, I certainly never heard about these enhancements being something you could enable though.
Of course i want to see that intel DX4! It was the first CPU i've overclocked with Voodoo, back then i got a good scare when it wouldn't boot but after everything cooled down everything was fine. Kids have it too easy nowadays, back then we had to use jumpers and just RTFM + YOLO for results. :D
Hehe. Changing settings in the BIOS are a lot easier. But these days, you can pick from 100 settings! I still prefer a handful of jumpers than going through AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive... Anyway, I guess I should check if that Intel DX4 actually works 😅
Cyrix 5x86 was stripped down version of Cyrix M1 (6x86) AKA the first out-of-order CPU for PC. Yeah, Cyrix was a leading company and beating Intel Pentium (had a simpler in-order execution, but better FPU than Cyrix). Cyrix M1 technology was on par with Pentium Pro and Pentium II (first OoO CPU from Intel). Too bad that Cyrix disappeared. Cyrix 5x86 has excellent memory access due to predictors/prefetch. 486 had no predictors at all hence so sensitive for FSB scaling in most games. BTW amazing video!!!
Thank you! I agree that there were great improvements in the Cyrix CPUs. Could have been that they were always short on time implementing new features and smart ways to improve performance
@@bitsundbolts I always wanted PC with Cyrix because it was the biggest bang for the buck. Also I think Cyrix is a cool name for tech company. It sounds so cool. It's not boring acronym like Integrated Electronics (Intel) or AMD. It sounds like Cyborg and robotix combined :D
The Cyrix was faster than a Pentium with floating point arithmetic, but it was slower at integers. And because many games back then still used integer calculations with a few exceptions, the Cyrix CPU was advertised as an office CPU.
Worth remembering that Wolf3D had been out for three months when the DX2/66 was introduced. Starting at pixelated raycasting and ending with texture-mapped 3D with bilinear filtering on the same machine would've been a revelation at any frame rate that wasn't a slide show.
Thank you very much B&B! These efforts are so appreciated by people like me who could not do it without great cost. I cannot imagine how many hours were needed to not only produce the benchmarks, but to package the data, restore all the hardware, and document the entire process in video form. You should be very proud of this work!
Very impressive results from the Cyrix processor, I had no idea it was such a speed demon! Also, great work with the benchmarking. I'm definitely glad I just left it up to the professionals, and just read their results in magazine reviews. I didn't have the patience to sit through game cut scenes, let alone actually figure out how to properly run game benchmarks. Looks like you've done a very thorough job in this video though.
Thank you! Yeah, sometimes I wonder how long people spent on benchmarking. I do not deny that it was a lot of work to get the benchmarks done for this video, but it wasn't that terrible. But I was surprised by the performance of the Cyrix 5x86. I just wish they would overclock better :(
Would love to see an pentium overdrive and evergreen upgrade (blue lightning) as well in the next video if possible! Loving the content and thank you. Could also be fun to see what soundcards increase performance.
Yeah, I noticed that my ESS AudioDrive recorded pretty bad, low quality mono sound. Ah well, what to do. Soundcards are coming soon. I got my hands in two Soundblaster 2.0
Fascinating. Great video. Than you so much for your rigger and diligence. I feel like I'm watching the dawn of the GPU in a parallel dimension. Amazing how focused people get on modern GPUs hitting 120 / 144 / 200+ fps and what is bottlenecking their precious 4090, when back in the 486 era the leaps with an overclock or 3Dfx board were truly transformative. I remember getting an extra 4MB of ram for £150 so I could play Doom on my DX2 66. The first time I saw a Voodoo card on a Pentium 1.Getting a Geforce 256 DDR and being gobsmacked at how much better Half Life 1 looked. These where revelatory moments.
So many revolutionary products were released in such a short period of time. Competition was fierce and if you couldn't compete, you were gone in a matter of months or years. 3Dfx Voodoo, Pentium, race to 1 GHz, and T&L GeForce. There was just so much happening.
So true. There were so many more competitors and innovators. Seeing how hard it is for even Intel to enter the discrete GPU market shows how hard it would be to create revolutionary products now.
@@ofrancis The new Intel Arc A770 GPUs are pretty good for their price, but only in newer games that use DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The Intel Arc GPUs have problems, especially with older games that use DirectX 8 and 9. A DirectX 9 to Vulkan wrapper helps a little bit here, but the compatibility is better with NVidia and ATI. But for pure DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, the future Intel GPUs are likely to be strong competition to NVidia and ATI, provided they get the power hunger under control. This is another current disadvantage of Intel Arc GPUs.
First accelerator card I owned was an Orchid Righteous 3d Voodoo 1 with 4mb ram. And Tomb Raider was the 1st game I tried on it. I'd just started a new job, got speaking to a guy at work who had just upgraded his rig and sold me the graphics card, Pentium 133 and motherboard for something like £100. This was circa 1997. Voodoo 2 wasn't out yet but it was on the horizon. Anyhow I went from software mode on a Pentium 60 to high res (640 x 480) accelerated mode on my 'new' rig. Regardless to say, I was impressed. I was firmly in the Voodoo camp from then until it died. Don't understand what went wrong there, at the time they were the market leader.
I am not entirely sure, but I think they burned bridges with their third party vendors (Diamond, Orchid, Guillemot, Creative, etc.). They only sold under the STB brand from Voodoo 3 onwards. Over time, nVidia had better GPUs and outperformed 3dfx who constantly delayed new product launches. 3dfx got too comfortable from their success of Voodoo and Voodoo 2 - which was helping their Voodoo 3 initially, but then they slowly drifted into insignificance. Sad.
My Very first PCI 4MB 3D card accelerator was actually the now very soat after NEC VideoLogic PCX2 with a full 4MB texture buffer that could run Ultimate Race Pro at 1024x768, I always thought that SGL API accelerator was miles ahead of the voodoo but the only problem and quite major was the lack of transparency effects and a few other but I remember running Tomb Raider at 1024x768 on it like URP and Mech Warrior plus others, I currently own several NEC PCX2 Cards plus Every 3DFX Card ever made, well sold that is including the ultra rare 6MB Voodoo 1 Pure3D Canopus that can output S-Video onto large screen CRT TV's that was amazing at the time, Going back to NEC PCX2 the picture quality was fantastic, way better than Voodoo both in- game as quality was quite soft and blurry at times plus the 2D pass-through was non existent.
What went wrong was that they hired a new CEO who knew nothing about the computer industry but a lot about potato harvesting. And he is responsible for 3dFX buying the board manufacturer STB. This meant that 3dFX suddenly had all the other board manufacturers as competitors who had previously bought a lot of 3d chips from 3dFX. This meant that a sales market was lost and NVidia and ATI filled the resulting gap. NVidia and ATI were pure chip manufacturers, they did not act as competitors to the circuit board manufacturers. The STB factory cost 3dFX a lot of money, including running costs. There was therefore no money for research and NVidia brought GPUs like the Geforce 1 and 2 onto the market, which could pose a threat to the Voodoo 5. From DirectX 6 onwards, there were no longer any significant advantages for the Glide API, which is why game manufacturers switched to DirectX and no longer released an extra Glide version for newer games. When 3dFX went bankrupt, there was a huge inventory of old games that benefited from Glide support, but the new games all ran very well with DirectX and in 32-bit color depth on a Geforce card. The previous 16-bit color depth was another weakness of the competition, because the Voodoo cards all had a 22-bit post filter, which made the image on the screen look better than the competition's 16-bit dithering. There is a very great interview available on YT with all 4 important company members of 3dFX. The interview is highly recommended.
Thank you for doing this test with a 486DX 33 MHz too. I had a CPU like that in my computer and I still have it and I always wanted to know what a 3D accelerator card would have done if its mainboard had a PCI slot. Now I finally know thanks to your test. Otherwise I have to say that all PC games from around 1996 run best with a Pentium 200 MHz or Pentium 2 266 MHz. From this time on, most games had a reasonable time measurement feature, so that CPUs that were too fast had little influence on playability. This wasn't the case with older games where the CPU mustn't be too fast.
You're welcome! I'm happy that this video could answer a question you had kept for so many years. And I also agree with your statement of running games on a fast Pentium MMX or Pentium II. I had a P2 350 after my 486 DX4-100. It was like day and night! Unfortunately, I had no Voodoo accelerator, just some ATI Rage chipset. Later, I got a Diamond Viper 550 TNT...
Cyrix DX 2/66 was my first CPU in my first pc. Then I upgrated it to AMD DX4/133 overclocked to 160 Mhz. Thanks for the time machine for my memory ;-)!
This video series is absolute best! I love it! It has everything. It has benchmarks, it has repair, it has comparisons. Keep up with a good work! Greetings from Poland!
Wow, so much information! And as always a big THANK YOU! Socket 3 is so diverse in terms of architectural differentiations...just insane! I wonder what the overdrive looks like (as a pentium derivate with (suggested) strong FPU and good branch prediction). The Cyrix 5x86 is definitely a big surprise. Next to (super) socket 7, socket 3 looks even crazier in terms of possible relative performance. And here i'm a litte bit nostalgic and miss this variety on todays sockets. I think this is the magical legacy of the 90s for retro computing enthusiasts.
You are welcome and I am happy you enjoyed the video! I agree that socket 3 is very versatile! You have ISA, PCI, VLB, FPM, EDO, different CPU vendors, etc. It was a defining platform and I am looking forward to testing VLB graphic cards and the Pentium Overdrive (soon, when I get the fan)
Ah the nostalgia...my first ever PC that I got back in about 1993, came equipped with that same Intel i486 DX2/66! 😊 Unfortunately though, I wasn't lucky enough to also have a 3D accelerator card, but I tended to mostly play Sierra Point&Click games on it anyway
I remember vividly playing Tomb Raider at a friend's house and they had a 486, long after Pentiums were out and mainstream. But 8 FPS was considered "playable" to a lot of younger people back then, just to be able to say you were playing the latest, greatest games at school. We've come so far when many people now say that 30 FPS is "unplayable".
I remember that as well. Nobody was talking much about frame rates back then. It was more like: "Hey, my PC can run X game" - didn't matter if it was at 15 or 35 FPS. You won when it started and you could actually play it.
It was the CRT monitors which have some incredible performance compated to monitors we use nowadays in terms of motion clarity, latency etc. Those saved the day for us back in the days. 30fps at such monitor can look really good, and so can 15fps :)
I played Wing Commander 3 on my 486DX33 Mhz with an ISA ET4000/W32 videocard. The space battles were playable at around 13-15 fps, but the last mission on the planet run at 3 fps. But somehow I managed to complete this mission and win the game.
I still have my 3DFX Voodoo 1 for MS-DOS and Voodoo 2 for Windows. My favorite 3DFX games in DOS were Carmageddon, Fatal Racing, Descent 2, Terminal Velocity and Tomb Raider. Windows. Carmageddon 2, Hellbender, NFS 3 and Descent 3 among others.
Great results! It's nice to see the performance scaling within the 486 chips. An original 3Dfx Voodoo card in a 486 machine is like pairing a current day Nvidia 4090 in a 3rd gen Intel Core CPU. It will work but the card is really going to be held back by the CPU! Still, it's cool to see the results! In my own experience back then a 40MHz FSB seemed to be the sweet spot for both Intel and AMD 486 CPUs. 50Mhz FSB can be faster, but only if you have L2 SRAM that's rated for 20ns or faster installed and if the BIOS doesn't automatically loosen timings for stability when running at that speed. Trying to get 50 MHz FSB stable on a late 486 board with PCI slots is possible. Trying to do the same on an earlier board with VLB or EISA slots (PCI hadn't been released when the 486 DX50 CPUs were first created) is really tough to do! Intel had briefly released a 486DX 50MHz non clock doubled chip in mid 1991. It was only used in a few business oriented systems as almost none of the big OEMs & board makers at the time wanted to spend the resources into developing systems that ran properly at a 50MHz FSB in 1991. The 486DX2 66MHz was released in early 1992 which used a 33 MHz FSB and was basically a drop in replacement for systems built around the 486DX 33Mhz which had been the dominant CPU at that point. I had an early 486DX2 66MHz based PC from 1992 and it ran well at 40MHz FSB for an 80Mhz CPU clock. The AMD 5x86 133 that I later upgraded to (with the help of an in-socket voltage adapter) also ran much better at 3x40MHz for 120MHz than at 3x33 for 100MHz, more than just the 20MHz bump in CPU speed would account for. I had a board that had no way of forcing a specific multiplier as the DX2 chips had not existed when the board was first designed, so the chip ran at 3x all the time due to this.
What another great detailed retro video, I love your channel and always look forward to the next, I've been building PC's since 1993 when I built my first using Intel DX2 66Mhz / 4MB 30Pin Simm/ Trident 1MB VLB/ Sound Blaster 2 Pro / 40MB Conner HDD ( Yeah I know so little storage space for such a powerful system for the time but I saved money on 120MB HDD to buy the fastest x86 on the planet at the time costing £450, probably £1500 in today's money,) a frew months before Intel released there Pentium 60 & 66Mhz chips but I couldn't wait any longer after saving up £1900 for all parts plus 14" Svga monitor. Anyway keep the great videos coming my friend, your content is total quality and takes me down memory lane. Peace love n respect from Glasgow Scotland
I am really happy you enjoy the videos! And thank you for your kind words! I also started with 486 systems - so, I do have an emotional attachment to this platform.
Hardware accelerated 3D was never worth it on a 486, the FPU is simply not fast enough no matter the CPU in any realistic scenario. Yes it makes a difference and yes, very few games might become playable, such as the case with Tomb Raider in a select few system configurations, but at a loss of visual fidelity more often than not. 3D simply needs a faster FPU, and Glide scales very well with CPU speed, so to really get the most out of the voodoo cards you need later, faster CPUs. Still a really cool series of videos, thanks for all your work!
My first PC was equipped with a Cyrix 5x86 100MHZ on a 486 Mainboard. I didn't actually know that i had such a good cpu in comparison. Now, some decades later i know
The Cyrix 5x86 is basically a baby Pentium(closer to a POD). The AMD 5x86 is a very fast 486. Which explains why AMD needs faster clock speeds. To me, simply incredible a 160mhz 486 exists and can closely match a 120mhz Cyrix. The Cyrix is basically a Pentium class chip up against a bunch of 486s😂
I really felt being ported back in time, the gaming experience was exactly like this, you just had to accept it :D Because upgrading was so expensive you were kind of stuck...
*checks own previous comments on 5x86 performance as well as 3dfx performance and grins smugly* as always, this was an absolute pleasure to watch, great work! excellent method of capturing and plotting/calculating the framerate! i'm really curious to see the pentium overdrive results at 83 and 100 mhz now, i think the fpu plays a major role and it will be another considerable step up. and YES, PLEASE! test an intel dx4-100 if you get the opportunity. it's the second cpu i owned and the 10 year old in me still considers it the best cpu ever made. 😄 in all honesty though, i'm fairly certain the 16kb l1 cache will make an appreciable difference.
I started with the next video already. The AMD 486 SX2-66 footage is captured 🤦♂️ 🚮 The FPU is so underrated - that is all I can say for now 😉 Hopefully the Intel DX4 is working - I will test it today. And the Pentium OverDrive will be the last video I want to make in this series. I should get an original fan by March...
Thrilled to see the next testing with new different CPUs! Newer thought that all those CPUs from that era when I wasn't able to buy a PC for myself will be so excited to watch now in comparison battle! P.S. I skipped many years of progress, and finally my first PC was with Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz (Prescott) that was able to gain 3.6GHz with slightly undervoltage, at least there I won some great example lottery 😅
Tomb Raider was the first game i played on my 3dfx. Had a P90 back then and even that couldn´t handle 30fps in 640x480 software renderer. With the 3dfx it was butter smooth. I remember playing TR III without sound on that machine still in 512 resolution. Demo was smooth but finally game had issues, maybe because everything was loaded from CD not from hard disk.
Those results felt so weird for me... But then you mentioned your bios settings being in "auto". Makes sense. All my boards have changed their timings based on FSB and multiplier. (the bios has a datatable in it for each combination) If you want good comparable results but don't want to mess with bios settings, set them manually very slow, but keep them fixed. ;)
Yes, that would have probably been better. I want to make a dedicated tuning video one day, but maybe on a different board. The Soyo Board doesn't support EDO memory.
ata-33 definately causes issues over 120- otbwas never used at higher clocks. or the voltages. and not much limits it across the board... increase cpu voltage, you decrease voltage to other parts... and vice versa
The Cyrix processors performed really well, especially with the enhancements enabled. Too bad they shipped with these disabled, so most people missed out on the extra performance.
The fight with the t-rex was the scariest thing I've ever felt in a game. I finished this game for the first time on a Sega Saturn and then played the Gold edition again on an Intel Pentium MMX 233MHz without a 3D accelerator. Good times...
They did really well for a game that old. Unreal comes close to this when you have to fight the Skaarj Warrior for the very first time! Pitch black and nowhere to run. Tomb Raider does it a bit better in my opinion. They managed to keep the environment bright, but the scene with the T-Rex is still scary. Especially when you're a kid and this is the first time you see something like this!
I have enjoyed this series very much so far, it is interesting to see 3DFX hardware on Socket 3 486 machines because I just don't remember anyone doing this back then, I'm sure some did but the 3DFX era was pretty much the Pentium ("Pentium Class") era and many of us had abandoned the 486 platform despite how fast it became in its later years. Quake killed the 486 before its time! I remember my dad having a PC with the 5x86 and I probably never gave it the respect it deserved, I just remember it underperforming woefully but then it apparently just needed some future knowledge and that Voodoo magic.
Yes, the moment the FPU became useful (and not just for some business applications), 486 was done. I mainly wanted to do this because the readme of Tomb Raider says you shouldn't run it on anything below a Pentium :) So, I was curious! Happy to hear that you enjoy it so far. I guess there will be two more videos.
Reminded me a lot of the good ol days. Never had 3dfx, and no good CPU like the top ends here. So yea.. 10fps at rex was probably me. And it was good enough. More than that. It gave me more experience and novelty than 4k 120fps in some generic game nowadays.
2:00 Also sometimes stuff breaks during shipping. I sold private a Thinkpad T61 on ebay. It worked before I shipped it. When it came to the buyer it was broken.
It probably depends on how it is handled. For sure there are exceptions, but when items are properly packed, the risk is minimized. Sad that the Thinkpad didn't make it.
Eager to know about the 486DX4-100. That was the CPU of my first computer :D Certainly I will drink afterwards, happy because of the poor results or sad because I missed out a great game. I did not play that game in my childhood.
Since I want to know the answers to some of the questions in this video too, I am working on another one which will cover the DX4-100, the SX-66, and maybe some other CPU frequencies.
i have an ibm branded cyrix 100mhz probably the same chip. it was my main socket 3 cpu until i dismantled the pc a while back. solid chip! also gotta say thanks for all your videos with repairs, especially with the mojo tool. I used the mojo tool to help me revive a voodoo 2 that had broken legs on a tmu and i couldnt be happier. a very cheap voodoo compared to today's prices - $80 AU, where a similar 12mb model goes for about $350-$400 AU now. it even came with a matching 2nd card but i really really messed it up. i've bridged about 4 pins and snapped one clean off. maybe one day i will try to dremel the chip edge down to the connector legs and see if i can do some bits und bolts necromancy :D
You are probably correct, the IBM chip is likely the same as the one on the Texas Instruments. Wasn't the IBM called 'Blue Lightning'? :) You are welcome! Thank you for your time watching my videos. And I am glad you could revive a Voodoo 2! Those cards will get more expensive over time. So, every saved card counts! I am sure that you will be able to fix the second card too one day. I wish you the best of "bits und bolts" luck!
@@bitsundbolts thanks ! i always thought blue lightning was a 33mhz chip but i just googled and saw the 100mhz with that name too.. interesting! i recall reading somewhere that the 100mhz can use setmul to get it down to 33mhz which i can see being really flexible. might have to try it out again soon!
Due to its architecture, glide needs a fast FPU, that's why 3Dfx and 486 ist not really a good combo. Cx5x86 has the best FPU among all 486 CPUs and this is what we see in the benchmarks. If someone wants to use 3Dfx, I'd suggest to go at least with Pentium 133, but this is a great video and a nice overview of how 3Dfx performs on a 486. Theory is good, practice is even better! Thank you very much.
Thank you 'scorp' ;) ! Yes, the Voodoo is severely bottlenecked by those CPUs - any 486. I am still surprised however, that you could get a halfway decent performance with a 3Dfx card. I wonder how many people actually added a Voodoo to their socket 3 system back in the day.
That Cyrix must've been their best chip design ever. Very impressive indeed. Makes me wish my 486 system had PCI (or heck, even VLB, but no, just 4x ISA) and socket 3, with all these optimizations it can outclass Pentiums!
23:12 Very cool how you did the framerate graphs. Not that easy for old games that do not use a modern API like OpenGL, Direct 3D or Vulkan. Sponsor fits perfect for the channel. 👍
Thank you! I'm glad that the frame time graphs and the benchmark graphs turned out well. And I hope Electromyne is going to work with me in the future so I can create more and better videos.
I would say, the results of the DX2/66 and lower are impressive. As you said, the resolution is much higher, than the software renderer, and the CPU has to calculate the whole geometry on an today unthinkable single core. The 3Dfx card is 3-4 years younger than the tested CPUs. From our today standpoint all 3Dfx work at best compared with a high CPU clockspeeds. Especially Glide is more a graphics API only, no other performance gains are included.
This is actually very impressive. To play at similar framerates as the AMD 5x86 160mhz with voodoo at 640x480 with software rendering only, you would need something like a pentium 200, maybe even faster. Pentium 200 was a very expensive CPU in 1996, the fastest available actually. It might be hard to appreciate if you have only experienced modern hardware '" waaaahh I only have 100fps at 4k resolution, my PC sucks" Back in the day, it was a revelation.
Adding a 3Dfx Voodoo card in your system made such a big difference - even for a 486 system as it seems. Not comparable with today. In 1996, 3Dfx Voodoo was revolutionary. And, you just had to add something to your system, not replace anything.
Excellent video! The 50 MHz FSB doesn't make much of a difference, because the limitation is the CPU's FPU. Which is why the AMD 5x86 results scale better with CPU frequency.
@@bitsundbolts, as far as I remember, Tomb Raider does start even on a 386 without an FPU (though, it's running @ 1 FPS or less). Quake, on the other hand, does not run without an FPU. 🙂
If I remember P200MMX was almost optimal CPU for Voodoo1 in _early_ 3D-games like TR1. Socket3 is certainly limiting factor, Socket7 and especially SuperSocket7 improved things a lot. And because CPU calculated geometry back then, 300-400MHz CPU's improved framerates quite dramatically sometimes - even with Voodoo1. I used K6-2's and K6-3 with Voodoo1, older 1st generation 3D-games flew with those.
That sounds about right! I would pair a Voodoo with a Pentium MMX 200/233. Voodoo 2 for faster Pentium II, and SLI for medium clocked Pentium III. And then slowly transition to Voodoo 3 and up.
If your testing develops into Socket7-era, it'd be interesting to see how Voodoo1 behaves with later Pentiums and 66/75 or even 83MHz FSB. If I remember P200MMX overclocked to 225/75 was visibly faster in some cases, we never used 83MHz FSB because 41.5MHz PCI-bus caused serious stability-issues. MB chipsets started to corrupt disk operations etc 😒@@bitsundbolts
@@bitsundbolts I would pair a Voodoo 3 or 5 PCI with a Pentium MMX 200/233. The reason is simply because the Voodoo 3 or 5 combines both 2D and 3D and, unlike all the NVidia cards (cough), it also has excellent DOS game (or VGA/VESA Mode) compatibility, which means it is also suitable for later software mode DOS games such as Duke Nukem 3D or Wing Commander 3. There is actually no reason for the Voodoo 1 or 2 if you have a Voodoo 3 or 5. Of course it looks different if you already own a Voodoo 2 and have to buy the Voodoo 3 separately. The advantage of the Voodoo 5 would be 32 bit color depth in Glide games.
Great video! I'm very impressed with the Cyrix 5x86! I thought the AMD would run better at 150MHz than 160 due to the higher bus speed, interesting to see it didn't. I would love to see the results with an SX and the Intel DX4 100MHz with its mighty 16KB L1! And a comparison of 486s!
I have a feeling that the higher clocked core still has an advantage because of a faster FPU. We will see how an SX works and draw some conclusions. Thanks for watching!
Noone I know of used a cyrix 486-100 only AMD and Intel 100mhz, which really is too bad since it seems to be a nice chip. Any plans for benchmarking with a Pentium 83 OD cpu? Sure its not a 486 but the series is named socket 3 :)
Yes, this video is coming soon. I am waiting for an original Intel fan since I am missing the one on mine. Without the fan, the CPU is limited to a multiplier of 1. I don't want to modify the CPU if I have the option to get such a fan soon.
Really nice video! What I always wonder is that I never ever saw any YT video using an intel 486 DX4 75Mhz. It has a 25mhz bus but I think it could be overclocked to 33mhz to match the dx4 100mhz
I haven't seen this CPU, but it is easy to downclock the 100 MHz version to 75 MHz. But you will probably end up with performance similar to the DX2-66 CPUs.
I am surprised to see the Cyrix outperforming the AMD, as back when we had those CPU's I alwways thought the Cyrixes are the lowest of the bunch just because they where often the cheapest.
Yes, the Cyrix did very well at a much lower clock speed. I wish there would be a possibility to remove the frame cap. I could imagine that the Cyrix would extend its lead significantly over the competition
The first time i finished Tomb raider was on my first pc an intel dx4 100mhz at 320x240.when Voodoo 1 arrived it was way better and I remember very playable at 640x480. Did know the existence of that beast the cyrix 586 but i want to know more and please compare it with the intel dx4 100. Excellent video review as always
That is a very nice combo! That is actually the same config that I got as a used PC that had a Orchid Righteous 3D in it... I still have all of those parts as well - fully working!
Interesting video, and what's especially interesting to me is the Cyrix 5x86. I've never played with these in this depth, exploring the enhanced performance is still on my todo list. And it seems those flags can enhance the Cyrix quite a bit. Btw those 486 boards can do fishy things as FSB increases, going to slower cache and memory timings is just the most obvious of these. Btw I _may_ have one 486 board of the many that possesses cache that can deal with 50MHz at the tightest timings, I found it an exceeeeedingly rare gift! No sets of 15ns nor 12ns, 256k ,512k or 1M chips can do this for me, only (maybe, I'm not even sure) a PCChips M919 cache stick that's incompatible with any other board.... I had much better luck with 40MHz, many chips CAN do 40MHz at 2-1-1-1 timigs, I even found EDO sticks that can be diabolically fast at that clock (single cycle, perhaps?) in a PCChips M918 (ALI chipset). But in other boards, there are many FPM and EDO sticks that are capable the tightest timings of those. PCI frequency is another can of worms, VGA access can slow down tremendously if a board decides that it must put a /2 divider on the PCI but at 40MHz. Not even a 2/3 one, it goes right to the kill and downclocks it to 20MHz. It's horrible, really. At 50MHz a 2/3 divider should still suffice, but no... Other boards can do 40MHz PCI and many VGAs and the onboard HDD controllers can deal with it. At 50MHz, it's tricky, though cards with AGP versions (like the Riva 128 I love as a quick DOS card) can usually deal with it flawlessly. VLB is an even bigger can of worms :D All in all, my favorite Am5x86 setting is definitely the 160MHz one, it performs very well, and I even have a permanent build like that. And I'm looking forward to trying the Cyrix 5x86 at 120MHz and pit the two against each other. I have 3 Cyrix parts lying around here, I hope at least one of them can do it.... About the FPU - I guess Tomb Raider won't even start without it, let alone its 3dfx patched version. It has A LOT to calculate and I'm quite sure an FPU was a standard part of a bog standard CPU when it came out so it's most probably heavily relies on it.
Yes, the benefit of a Voodoo is severely limited by a 486 CPU. In my other Tomb Raider video, I tested a Pentium 133 and we mostly remained at the 30 fps cap. So, yes, you're correct - a fast Pentium is required to get the full potential of a 3Dfx accelerator
Fascinating results from the "unlocked" Cyrix 5x86, it would be probably even more fascinating to do a performance scaling comparison with the Cyrix MediaGX based on a similar CPU core... if not for the fact most of the MediaGX systems are probably dead or/and shredded for a gold dust (lol)
Thanks for the video BuB. Interesting to see the CPU limiting the frame rate. Will you try on Intel P166 or P200 MMX to see if you get get to the 30 FPS cap with the T-Rex?
I already have a video on my channel with a P120 and P133 using a Voodoo with 4, 6, and 8MB of memory. Just search for Tomb Raider on my channel and you should find that video - it's about a year old.
Meine Güte müssen für die Erhebung der Daten viele Stunden drauf gegangen sein! Das war wirklich umfassend und der Cyrix macht richtig was her! Obwohl alle Verbesserungen abgeschaltet waren, zog er den DX4-100 komplett aus. Interessant auchj die Ergebnisse vom großen AMD. 4*40 ist schneller als 3*50. Da hat wohl das Board die Bremse reingehauen.
Ja, beim AMD 150 muss was bremsen. Das Soyo Board hat ein paar Ecken und Kanten. Muss das mal auf einem anderen Board testen welches auch EDO RAM unterstützt
What I would see as interesting is to compare the performance of the 486 CPUs to the PS1, since from my time playing it the game seemed to run at a pretty stable 30FPS with frame drops here and there. I think the fight against the T-Rex was around 20FPS but i never used benchmarking tools it's just my recollection. Might be an idea to put those performance figures into a part of these series? People back in the day sure might have had the consideration of putting out like 300 bucks for a Pentium 2 or 586 or just get a PS1 for cheaper to play the game. Would love to see a comparison!
I wouldn't mind to be the reason to re-ignite the battle between PC and PS1 gamers trying to convince each other that device is better than the other :D Unfortunately, I do not have a PS1. But if someone would offer to send me the uncompressed (*.mkv) footage of the PlayStation, I could analyze it and put it next to some PC footage... Then we would be able to figure out what PC you would need to be on par with Sony's PlayStation.
Cyrix 5x86 was half on its way to fifth generation and had many features pure 486 CPUs in this test missed. That it performs well with that competition should not be surprising (especially with enhancements enabled). But AMD managed to give it a run for its money with pure 486 tech and enough Mhz. Had a Cyrix 5x86 100 Mhz system in the early 2000s (saved from the recycling bin) but never used it much. Cyrix was for me always only third class behind Intel and AMD and I remember that some programs were not running at all on it because of compatibilty problems in Cyrix CPUs (6x86?). Removed the mainboard at some point of time and installed an AMD 5x86 133 Mhz system inside. That computer is with me to this day for occasional retro sessions. ^^
I had an AMD 486-DX4-100 back then. Never even heard of Cyrix back then. It was always Intel or AMD. Well, it was the cheaper alternative for me. And yes, the Cyrix is more advanced having features from the next generation on board. Still nice to have so many different options for this platform.
I never had any Cyrix CPU. The 5x86 is the first CPU I am using and it is quite impressive. Based on what you're saying, I will be disappointed by the MII that I will fix some time in the future.
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For those wondering why the CPU has such a huge impact on the framerate even with a 3D accelerator, it's important to remember that these early 3D accelerators only implemented a hardware rasterizer, i.e. they could draw triangles on the screen with texture mapping and gouraud shading. That's about it. All of the 3D transformation math still had to be done on the CPU, meaning that the more polygons you had in the scene, the more work the CPU had to do. This made that early 3D accelerated games were still very heavily CPU bound. This didn't change until the first GeForce card introduced Hardware Transform & Lighting, with which the 3D math could be delegated to the GPU.
The antialiasing test and maybe also the 3Dfx logo animation may be good examples of what you are explaining. T&L was definitely a huge advancement which helped nVidia to finally and undisputedly pull ahead of the competition - to the detriment of 3dfx.
486 was quite poor on FP instructions...fmuls and fdivs were a manifold slower than Pentium
That wasnt initial attempt. It's just first mass PC api with this feature.
Famous GTE polygon jitter bug in PS1 says exactly about it's presence )
One of earlier 3d accelerator apis also featured such transforms, but cant just remember exact which one.
Ok, maybe a test with 486 + T&L capable GPU? Wouldnt make much sense in Real world application, but would be fun to see
@@Thomsonicus PowerVR in SGL mode allows use of hardware transforms AFAIR. But there is not much games with NATIVE powervr support. Fortunately, TR supports PowerVR in any generation of its time, but was it native or something like d3d - idk.
Yes! This is the power of Voodoo, even on slower CPUs it really makes a difference! It's a real shame the top Cyrix has bugged features, it has a lot of potential...
Correct! It is a really nice CPU for socket 3 if they just had more time to finish the features properly and fix the bugs.
Very nice result from the Cyrix 5x86!
Yes! I was surprised by its performance!
Hought the amd dx4120 was the fastest & was surprised to see the Cyres results. I know they had the best fpu at 1 point so it could be the reason it did so well . Great video well presented & very enlightening . Thanks
@@bitsundbolts I might have missed this in previous videos but do we know why so many features were disabled on these chips? I remember they got panned hard in reviews etc and as you have noted they didn't even last a year on the market, I certainly never heard about these enhancements being something you could enable though.
Cyrix and later AMD 5x86 was equipped with 3Dnow module, some sort of pre-MMX functions. This explain much better performance in gaming apps.
Of course i want to see that intel DX4!
It was the first CPU i've overclocked with Voodoo, back then i got a good scare when it wouldn't boot but after everything cooled down everything was fine.
Kids have it too easy nowadays, back then we had to use jumpers and just RTFM + YOLO for results. :D
Hehe. Changing settings in the BIOS are a lot easier. But these days, you can pick from 100 settings! I still prefer a handful of jumpers than going through AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive... Anyway, I guess I should check if that Intel DX4 actually works 😅
that cyrix is a beast!
Absolutely!
Cyrix 5x86 was stripped down version of Cyrix M1 (6x86) AKA the first out-of-order CPU for PC. Yeah, Cyrix was a leading company and beating Intel Pentium (had a simpler in-order execution, but better FPU than Cyrix). Cyrix M1 technology was on par with Pentium Pro and Pentium II (first OoO CPU from Intel). Too bad that Cyrix disappeared.
Cyrix 5x86 has excellent memory access due to predictors/prefetch. 486 had no predictors at all hence so sensitive for FSB scaling in most games. BTW amazing video!!!
Thank you! I agree that there were great improvements in the Cyrix CPUs. Could have been that they were always short on time implementing new features and smart ways to improve performance
@@bitsundbolts I always wanted PC with Cyrix because it was the biggest bang for the buck. Also I think Cyrix is a cool name for tech company. It sounds so cool. It's not boring acronym like Integrated Electronics (Intel) or AMD. It sounds like Cyborg and robotix combined :D
The Cyrix was faster than a Pentium with floating point arithmetic, but it was slower at integers. And because many games back then still used integer calculations with a few exceptions, the Cyrix CPU was advertised as an office CPU.
Worth remembering that Wolf3D had been out for three months when the DX2/66 was introduced. Starting at pixelated raycasting and ending with texture-mapped 3D with bilinear filtering on the same machine would've been a revelation at any frame rate that wasn't a slide show.
Thank you very much B&B! These efforts are so appreciated by people like me who could not do it without great cost. I cannot imagine how many hours were needed to not only produce the benchmarks, but to package the data, restore all the hardware, and document the entire process in video form.
You should be very proud of this work!
Thank you so much! I am happy to hear that this and the previous videos are well received and bring joy to many! Thank you for watching!
Very impressive results from the Cyrix processor, I had no idea it was such a speed demon! Also, great work with the benchmarking. I'm definitely glad I just left it up to the professionals, and just read their results in magazine reviews. I didn't have the patience to sit through game cut scenes, let alone actually figure out how to properly run game benchmarks. Looks like you've done a very thorough job in this video though.
Thank you! Yeah, sometimes I wonder how long people spent on benchmarking. I do not deny that it was a lot of work to get the benchmarks done for this video, but it wasn't that terrible. But I was surprised by the performance of the Cyrix 5x86. I just wish they would overclock better :(
Would love to see an pentium overdrive and evergreen upgrade (blue lightning) as well in the next video if possible! Loving the content and thank you. Could also be fun to see what soundcards increase performance.
Yeah, I noticed that my ESS AudioDrive recorded pretty bad, low quality mono sound. Ah well, what to do. Soundcards are coming soon. I got my hands in two Soundblaster 2.0
Excellent retro review! Enjoyed every minute of it. The 90's was such a great time for hardware and platform modularity. Socket 3 really was a beast.
Thank you!
Fascinating. Great video. Than you so much for your rigger and diligence. I feel like I'm watching the dawn of the GPU in a parallel dimension.
Amazing how focused people get on modern GPUs hitting 120 / 144 / 200+ fps and what is bottlenecking their precious 4090, when back in the 486 era the leaps with an overclock or 3Dfx board were truly transformative.
I remember getting an extra 4MB of ram for £150 so I could play Doom on my DX2 66. The first time I saw a Voodoo card on a Pentium 1.Getting a Geforce 256 DDR and being gobsmacked at how much better Half Life 1 looked. These where revelatory moments.
So many revolutionary products were released in such a short period of time. Competition was fierce and if you couldn't compete, you were gone in a matter of months or years. 3Dfx Voodoo, Pentium, race to 1 GHz, and T&L GeForce. There was just so much happening.
So true. There were so many more competitors and innovators. Seeing how hard it is for even Intel to enter the discrete GPU market shows how hard it would be to create revolutionary products now.
@@ofrancis The new Intel Arc A770 GPUs are pretty good for their price, but only in newer games that use DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The Intel Arc GPUs have problems, especially with older games that use DirectX 8 and 9. A DirectX 9 to Vulkan wrapper helps a little bit here, but the compatibility is better with NVidia and ATI.
But for pure DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, the future Intel GPUs are likely to be strong competition to NVidia and ATI, provided they get the power hunger under control. This is another current disadvantage of Intel Arc GPUs.
First accelerator card I owned was an Orchid Righteous 3d Voodoo 1 with 4mb ram. And Tomb Raider was the 1st game I tried on it. I'd just started a new job, got speaking to a guy at work who had just upgraded his rig and sold me the graphics card, Pentium 133 and motherboard for something like £100. This was circa 1997. Voodoo 2 wasn't out yet but it was on the horizon. Anyhow I went from software mode on a Pentium 60 to high res (640 x 480) accelerated mode on my 'new' rig. Regardless to say, I was impressed. I was firmly in the Voodoo camp from then until it died. Don't understand what went wrong there, at the time they were the market leader.
I am not entirely sure, but I think they burned bridges with their third party vendors (Diamond, Orchid, Guillemot, Creative, etc.). They only sold under the STB brand from Voodoo 3 onwards. Over time, nVidia had better GPUs and outperformed 3dfx who constantly delayed new product launches. 3dfx got too comfortable from their success of Voodoo and Voodoo 2 - which was helping their Voodoo 3 initially, but then they slowly drifted into insignificance. Sad.
My Very first PCI 4MB 3D card accelerator was actually the now very soat after NEC VideoLogic PCX2 with a full 4MB texture buffer that could run Ultimate Race Pro at 1024x768, I always thought that SGL API accelerator was miles ahead of the voodoo but the only problem and quite major was the lack of transparency effects and a few other but I remember running Tomb Raider at 1024x768 on it like URP and Mech Warrior plus others,
I currently own several NEC PCX2 Cards plus Every 3DFX Card ever made, well sold that is including the ultra rare 6MB Voodoo 1 Pure3D Canopus that can output S-Video onto large screen CRT TV's that was amazing at the time,
Going back to NEC PCX2 the picture quality was fantastic, way better than Voodoo both in- game as quality was quite soft and blurry at times plus the 2D pass-through was non existent.
3dfx died, just like commodore and many other, because of really stupid business decisions and Poor management
Faster cpu will help but eventually you'll hit the fill rate limit of the card
What went wrong was that they hired a new CEO who knew nothing about the computer industry but a lot about potato harvesting. And he is responsible for 3dFX buying the board manufacturer STB. This meant that 3dFX suddenly had all the other board manufacturers as competitors who had previously bought a lot of 3d chips from 3dFX.
This meant that a sales market was lost and NVidia and ATI filled the resulting gap. NVidia and ATI were pure chip manufacturers, they did not act as competitors to the circuit board manufacturers.
The STB factory cost 3dFX a lot of money, including running costs. There was therefore no money for research and NVidia brought GPUs like the Geforce 1 and 2 onto the market, which could pose a threat to the Voodoo 5.
From DirectX 6 onwards, there were no longer any significant advantages for the Glide API, which is why game manufacturers switched to DirectX and no longer released an extra Glide version for newer games. When 3dFX went bankrupt, there was a huge inventory of old games that benefited from Glide support, but the new games all ran very well with DirectX and in 32-bit color depth on a Geforce card.
The previous 16-bit color depth was another weakness of the competition, because the Voodoo cards all had a 22-bit post filter, which made the image on the screen look better than the competition's 16-bit dithering.
There is a very great interview available on YT with all 4 important company members of 3dFX. The interview is highly recommended.
Thank you for doing this test with a 486DX 33 MHz too. I had a CPU like that in my computer and I still have it and I always wanted to know what a 3D accelerator card would have done if its mainboard had a PCI slot. Now I finally know thanks to your test.
Otherwise I have to say that all PC games from around 1996 run best with a Pentium 200 MHz or Pentium 2 266 MHz. From this time on, most games had a reasonable time measurement feature, so that CPUs that were too fast had little influence on playability. This wasn't the case with older games where the CPU mustn't be too fast.
You're welcome! I'm happy that this video could answer a question you had kept for so many years. And I also agree with your statement of running games on a fast Pentium MMX or Pentium II. I had a P2 350 after my 486 DX4-100. It was like day and night! Unfortunately, I had no Voodoo accelerator, just some ATI Rage chipset. Later, I got a Diamond Viper 550 TNT...
Series still goin, great! :D
Cyrix DX 2/66 was my first CPU in my first pc. Then I upgrated it to AMD DX4/133 overclocked to 160 Mhz. Thanks for the time machine for my memory ;-)!
This video series is absolute best! I love it! It has everything. It has benchmarks, it has repair, it has comparisons. Keep up with a good work! Greetings from Poland!
Thank you very much! I am glad that you enjoy this series! Thanks for watching!
Wow, so much information! And as always a big THANK YOU! Socket 3 is so diverse in terms of architectural differentiations...just insane! I wonder what the overdrive looks like (as a pentium derivate with (suggested) strong FPU and good branch prediction). The Cyrix 5x86 is definitely a big surprise. Next to (super) socket 7, socket 3 looks even crazier in terms of possible relative performance. And here i'm a litte bit nostalgic and miss this variety on todays sockets. I think this is the magical legacy of the 90s for retro computing enthusiasts.
You are welcome and I am happy you enjoyed the video! I agree that socket 3 is very versatile! You have ISA, PCI, VLB, FPM, EDO, different CPU vendors, etc. It was a defining platform and I am looking forward to testing VLB graphic cards and the Pentium Overdrive (soon, when I get the fan)
Bro I love your content... Watched with peak focus from beginning to end💪 also I love your accent and the way you say CPU, "CP-oo”😂 freaking gold!
Hehe. Thanks for watching
Very interesting benchmarks, like!
Thanks!
Wow, would love to see more video comparisons like this. Cheers!
Oh man this brings back memories! Excellent stuff!
I really was not expecting such a strong showing for Cyrix
Ah the nostalgia...my first ever PC that I got back in about 1993, came equipped with that same Intel i486 DX2/66! 😊
Unfortunately though, I wasn't lucky enough to also have a 3D accelerator card, but I tended to mostly play Sierra Point&Click games on it anyway
I remember vividly playing Tomb Raider at a friend's house and they had a 486, long after Pentiums were out and mainstream. But 8 FPS was considered "playable" to a lot of younger people back then, just to be able to say you were playing the latest, greatest games at school. We've come so far when many people now say that 30 FPS is "unplayable".
I remember that as well. Nobody was talking much about frame rates back then. It was more like: "Hey, my PC can run X game" - didn't matter if it was at 15 or 35 FPS. You won when it started and you could actually play it.
It was the CRT monitors which have some incredible performance compated to monitors we use nowadays in terms of motion clarity, latency etc. Those saved the day for us back in the days. 30fps at such monitor can look really good, and so can 15fps :)
I played Wing Commander 3 on my 486DX33 Mhz with an ISA ET4000/W32 videocard.
The space battles were playable at around 13-15 fps, but the last mission on the planet run at 3 fps. But somehow I managed to complete this mission and win the game.
thats how we did it :) We played at sub 10fps at times. @@OpenGL4ever
Think I've said this before, but I'll say it again for the RUclips Algo. These are really great. Thanks for your hard work!
Thank you very much! Yeah, any interaction with the videos work! Thanks for watching, liking, and commenting!
I still have my 3DFX Voodoo 1 for MS-DOS and Voodoo 2 for Windows. My favorite 3DFX games in DOS were Carmageddon, Fatal Racing, Descent 2, Terminal Velocity and Tomb Raider. Windows. Carmageddon 2, Hellbender, NFS 3 and Descent 3 among others.
THE socket 3 benchmark! Great to see the performance increase going from CPU to CPU! Cyrix is impressive indeed!
Thank you Tony! I just wish those Cyrix 5x86 CPUs would overclock better! Thanks for watching!
Great results! It's nice to see the performance scaling within the 486 chips. An original 3Dfx Voodoo card in a 486 machine is like pairing a current day Nvidia 4090 in a 3rd gen Intel Core CPU. It will work but the card is really going to be held back by the CPU! Still, it's cool to see the results!
In my own experience back then a 40MHz FSB seemed to be the sweet spot for both Intel and AMD 486 CPUs. 50Mhz FSB can be faster, but only if you have L2 SRAM that's rated for 20ns or faster installed and if the BIOS doesn't automatically loosen timings for stability when running at that speed. Trying to get 50 MHz FSB stable on a late 486 board with PCI slots is possible. Trying to do the same on an earlier board with VLB or EISA slots (PCI hadn't been released when the 486 DX50 CPUs were first created) is really tough to do!
Intel had briefly released a 486DX 50MHz non clock doubled chip in mid 1991. It was only used in a few business oriented systems as almost none of the big OEMs & board makers at the time wanted to spend the resources into developing systems that ran properly at a 50MHz FSB in 1991. The 486DX2 66MHz was released in early 1992 which used a 33 MHz FSB and was basically a drop in replacement for systems built around the 486DX 33Mhz which had been the dominant CPU at that point.
I had an early 486DX2 66MHz based PC from 1992 and it ran well at 40MHz FSB for an 80Mhz CPU clock. The AMD 5x86 133 that I later upgraded to (with the help of an in-socket voltage adapter) also ran much better at 3x40MHz for 120MHz than at 3x33 for 100MHz, more than just the 20MHz bump in CPU speed would account for. I had a board that had no way of forcing a specific multiplier as the DX2 chips had not existed when the board was first designed, so the chip ran at 3x all the time due to this.
Awesome, doing a small build and this should fill in that time nicely :D
Haha, great and good luck!
What another great detailed retro video, I love your channel and always look forward to the next,
I've been building PC's since 1993 when I built my first using Intel DX2 66Mhz / 4MB 30Pin Simm/ Trident 1MB VLB/ Sound Blaster 2 Pro / 40MB Conner HDD ( Yeah I know so little storage space for such a powerful system for the time but I saved money on 120MB HDD to buy the fastest x86 on the planet at the time costing £450, probably £1500 in today's money,) a frew months before Intel released there Pentium 60 & 66Mhz chips but I couldn't wait any longer after saving up £1900 for all parts plus 14" Svga monitor.
Anyway keep the great videos coming my friend, your content is total quality and takes me down memory lane.
Peace love n respect from Glasgow Scotland
I am really happy you enjoy the videos! And thank you for your kind words! I also started with 486 systems - so, I do have an emotional attachment to this platform.
Excellent video, a lot of hours and effort put in.
Thank you. Yes, it was quite a bit of work
Hardware accelerated 3D was never worth it on a 486, the FPU is simply not fast enough no matter the CPU in any realistic scenario. Yes it makes a difference and yes, very few games might become playable, such as the case with Tomb Raider in a select few system configurations, but at a loss of visual fidelity more often than not. 3D simply needs a faster FPU, and Glide scales very well with CPU speed, so to really get the most out of the voodoo cards you need later, faster CPUs.
Still a really cool series of videos, thanks for all your work!
Absolutely agree! Let's wait for the Pentium Overdrive - which will be the last video in this series. Thanks for watching!
With the POD I'd wager GLQuake might be doable. At that point you probably run into the bus speed limitations next.
Excellent work mate
Thank you! Cheers!
My first PC was equipped with a Cyrix 5x86 100MHZ on a 486 Mainboard. I didn't actually know that i had such a good cpu in comparison. Now, some decades later i know
The Cyrix 5x86 is basically a baby Pentium(closer to a POD). The AMD 5x86 is a very fast 486. Which explains why AMD needs faster clock speeds. To me, simply incredible a 160mhz 486 exists and can closely match a 120mhz Cyrix. The Cyrix is basically a Pentium class chip up against a bunch of 486s😂
It definitely has advantages. I just would want to know how much the FPU differs between the Cyrix and the POD.
I really felt being ported back in time, the gaming experience was exactly like this, you just had to accept it :D
Because upgrading was so expensive you were kind of stuck...
*checks own previous comments on 5x86 performance as well as 3dfx performance and grins smugly*
as always, this was an absolute pleasure to watch, great work! excellent method of capturing and plotting/calculating the framerate! i'm really curious to see the pentium overdrive results at 83 and 100 mhz now, i think the fpu plays a major role and it will be another considerable step up.
and YES, PLEASE! test an intel dx4-100 if you get the opportunity. it's the second cpu i owned and the 10 year old in me still considers it the best cpu ever made. 😄 in all honesty though, i'm fairly certain the 16kb l1 cache will make an appreciable difference.
I started with the next video already. The AMD 486 SX2-66 footage is captured 🤦♂️ 🚮
The FPU is so underrated - that is all I can say for now 😉
Hopefully the Intel DX4 is working - I will test it today. And the Pentium OverDrive will be the last video I want to make in this series. I should get an original fan by March...
Fantastische Arbeit, informativ, umfassend und spannend.
Vielen Dank!
loved the whole series thx.
Thrilled to see the next testing with new different CPUs! Newer thought that all those CPUs from that era when I wasn't able to buy a PC for myself will be so excited to watch now in comparison battle! P.S. I skipped many years of progress, and finally my first PC was with Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz (Prescott) that was able to gain 3.6GHz with slightly undervoltage, at least there I won some great example lottery 😅
Wow, that is a great example of winning the silicone lottery! Congrats! The next video will be an eye opener! I started already with the first CPU ;)
Tomb Raider was the first game i played on my 3dfx. Had a P90 back then and even that couldn´t handle 30fps in 640x480 software renderer. With the 3dfx it was butter smooth.
I remember playing TR III without sound on that machine still in 512 resolution. Demo was smooth but finally game had issues, maybe because everything was loaded from CD not from hard disk.
Very nice, would love to see more comparisons!
Working on a few more CPUs now
Can't wait for the Overdrive result!!!
Same here! Just need that fan to arrive :)
Those results felt so weird for me... But then you mentioned your bios settings being in "auto". Makes sense. All my boards have changed their timings based on FSB and multiplier. (the bios has a datatable in it for each combination)
If you want good comparable results but don't want to mess with bios settings, set them manually very slow, but keep them fixed. ;)
Yes, that would have probably been better. I want to make a dedicated tuning video one day, but maybe on a different board. The Soyo Board doesn't support EDO memory.
very much needed clock speeds displayed too hehe loved your stats from other videos
ata-33 definately causes issues over 120- otbwas never used at higher clocks. or the voltages. and not much limits it across the board... increase cpu voltage, you decrease voltage to other parts... and vice versa
The Cyrix processors performed really well, especially with the enhancements enabled. Too bad they shipped with these disabled, so most people missed out on the extra performance.
The problem is that those enhancements seem to be buggy and lead to instability in certain situations.
Definitely need to do a 486 cpu benchmark video.😊
The fight with the t-rex was the scariest thing I've ever felt in a game.
I finished this game for the first time on a Sega Saturn and then played the Gold edition again on an Intel Pentium MMX 233MHz without a 3D accelerator. Good times...
They did really well for a game that old. Unreal comes close to this when you have to fight the Skaarj Warrior for the very first time! Pitch black and nowhere to run. Tomb Raider does it a bit better in my opinion. They managed to keep the environment bright, but the scene with the T-Rex is still scary. Especially when you're a kid and this is the first time you see something like this!
Yes MOAR testing!!!
Incredible work - must have taken ages to gather all the data!
It was a lot of work, but I am happy that I managed to do it!
I have enjoyed this series very much so far, it is interesting to see 3DFX hardware on Socket 3 486 machines because I just don't remember anyone doing this back then, I'm sure some did but the 3DFX era was pretty much the Pentium ("Pentium Class") era and many of us had abandoned the 486 platform despite how fast it became in its later years.
Quake killed the 486 before its time! I remember my dad having a PC with the 5x86 and I probably never gave it the respect it deserved, I just remember it underperforming woefully but then it apparently just needed some future knowledge and that Voodoo magic.
Yes, the moment the FPU became useful (and not just for some business applications), 486 was done. I mainly wanted to do this because the readme of Tomb Raider says you shouldn't run it on anything below a Pentium :) So, I was curious! Happy to hear that you enjoy it so far. I guess there will be two more videos.
Reminded me a lot of the good ol days. Never had 3dfx, and no good CPU like the top ends here. So yea.. 10fps at rex was probably me. And it was good enough. More than that. It gave me more experience and novelty than 4k 120fps in some generic game nowadays.
Looking back, wow was I amazed at the 3dfx graphics with Lara ... looking even at it nowadays show you how far technology has come in 28 years ....
I heard that the cyrix 586 is a decent performer - but hadn't expect it to beat the overclocked amd 586 (120 vs. 160mhz!). Great comparison, thanks🎉
Unexpected indeed! Thanks for watching!
When i bought an Orchid Righteous 3D 3Dfx, i had a Pentium 166, so no problem with frame rate. 30 fps rock solid.
2:00 Also sometimes stuff breaks during shipping. I sold private a Thinkpad T61 on ebay. It worked before I shipped it. When it came to the buyer it was broken.
It probably depends on how it is handled. For sure there are exceptions, but when items are properly packed, the risk is minimized. Sad that the Thinkpad didn't make it.
Eager to know about the 486DX4-100. That was the CPU of my first computer :D Certainly I will drink afterwards, happy because of the poor results or sad because I missed out a great game. I did not play that game in my childhood.
Since I want to know the answers to some of the questions in this video too, I am working on another one which will cover the DX4-100, the SX-66, and maybe some other CPU frequencies.
i have an ibm branded cyrix 100mhz probably the same chip. it was my main socket 3 cpu until i dismantled the pc a while back. solid chip!
also gotta say thanks for all your videos with repairs, especially with the mojo tool. I used the mojo tool to help me revive a voodoo 2 that had broken legs on a tmu and i couldnt be happier. a very cheap voodoo compared to today's prices - $80 AU, where a similar 12mb model goes for about $350-$400 AU now. it even came with a matching 2nd card but i really really messed it up. i've bridged about 4 pins and snapped one clean off. maybe one day i will try to dremel the chip edge down to the connector legs and see if i can do some bits und bolts necromancy :D
You are probably correct, the IBM chip is likely the same as the one on the Texas Instruments. Wasn't the IBM called 'Blue Lightning'? :)
You are welcome! Thank you for your time watching my videos. And I am glad you could revive a Voodoo 2! Those cards will get more expensive over time. So, every saved card counts! I am sure that you will be able to fix the second card too one day. I wish you the best of "bits und bolts" luck!
@@bitsundbolts thanks ! i always thought blue lightning was a 33mhz chip but i just googled and saw the 100mhz with that name too.. interesting!
i recall reading somewhere that the 100mhz can use setmul to get it down to 33mhz which i can see being really flexible. might have to try it out again soon!
Due to its architecture, glide needs a fast FPU, that's why 3Dfx and 486 ist not really a good combo. Cx5x86 has the best FPU among all 486 CPUs and this is what we see in the benchmarks. If someone wants to use 3Dfx, I'd suggest to go at least with Pentium 133, but this is a great video and a nice overview of how 3Dfx performs on a 486. Theory is good, practice is even better! Thank you very much.
Thank you 'scorp' ;) ! Yes, the Voodoo is severely bottlenecked by those CPUs - any 486. I am still surprised however, that you could get a halfway decent performance with a 3Dfx card. I wonder how many people actually added a Voodoo to their socket 3 system back in the day.
AMD 5x86@160 Mhz this was my last 486 CPU.
33Fsb 133 mhz, 40 mhz 160 mhz it was a no brainer. My CPU never see the 133 mhz.
That Cyrix must've been their best chip design ever. Very impressive indeed.
Makes me wish my 486 system had PCI (or heck, even VLB, but no, just 4x ISA) and socket 3, with all these optimizations it can outclass Pentiums!
I should get some early Pentium systems together on socket 5 maybe.
@@bitsundbolts pentium 75, 90 and 100 would indeed be interesting to see.
23:12 Very cool how you did the framerate graphs.
Not that easy for old games that do not use a modern API like OpenGL, Direct 3D or Vulkan.
Sponsor fits perfect for the channel. 👍
Thank you! I'm glad that the frame time graphs and the benchmark graphs turned out well. And I hope Electromyne is going to work with me in the future so I can create more and better videos.
A 486 benchmark video would be great!
I would say, the results of the DX2/66 and lower are impressive. As you said, the resolution is much higher, than the software renderer, and the CPU has to calculate the whole geometry on an today unthinkable single core. The 3Dfx card is 3-4 years younger than the tested CPUs. From our today standpoint all 3Dfx work at best compared with a high CPU clockspeeds. Especially Glide is more a graphics API only, no other performance gains are included.
Yes, I would like to see the other cpu charts.. thanks..
Noted!
Finally the 3dfx came into the picture
This is actually very impressive. To play at similar framerates as the AMD 5x86 160mhz with voodoo at 640x480 with software rendering only, you would need something like a pentium 200, maybe even faster.
Pentium 200 was a very expensive CPU in 1996, the fastest available actually.
It might be hard to appreciate if you have only experienced modern hardware '" waaaahh I only have 100fps at 4k resolution, my PC sucks"
Back in the day, it was a revelation.
Adding a 3Dfx Voodoo card in your system made such a big difference - even for a 486 system as it seems. Not comparable with today. In 1996, 3Dfx Voodoo was revolutionary. And, you just had to add something to your system, not replace anything.
Excellent video!
The 50 MHz FSB doesn't make much of a difference, because the limitation is the CPU's FPU. Which is why the AMD 5x86 results scale better with CPU frequency.
I also suspect the FPU... I wonder if the game would even start with a SX CPU...
@@bitsundbolts, as far as I remember, Tomb Raider does start even on a 386 without an FPU (though, it's running @ 1 FPS or less). Quake, on the other hand, does not run without an FPU. 🙂
Haha, wow... OK, I won't try it on a 386, but good to know that it starts.
This doesn't happen often, but yeah I'm going to try your sponsor next time I want some retro hardware. 😊
If I remember P200MMX was almost optimal CPU for Voodoo1 in _early_ 3D-games like TR1. Socket3 is certainly limiting factor, Socket7 and especially SuperSocket7 improved things a lot. And because CPU calculated geometry back then, 300-400MHz CPU's improved framerates quite dramatically sometimes - even with Voodoo1. I used K6-2's and K6-3 with Voodoo1, older 1st generation 3D-games flew with those.
That sounds about right! I would pair a Voodoo with a Pentium MMX 200/233. Voodoo 2 for faster Pentium II, and SLI for medium clocked Pentium III. And then slowly transition to Voodoo 3 and up.
If your testing develops into Socket7-era, it'd be interesting to see how Voodoo1 behaves with later Pentiums and 66/75 or even 83MHz FSB. If I remember P200MMX overclocked to 225/75 was visibly faster in some cases, we never used 83MHz FSB because 41.5MHz PCI-bus caused serious stability-issues. MB chipsets started to corrupt disk operations etc 😒@@bitsundbolts
@@bitsundbolts I would pair a Voodoo 3 or 5 PCI with a Pentium MMX 200/233. The reason is simply because the Voodoo 3 or 5 combines both 2D and 3D and, unlike all the NVidia cards (cough), it also has excellent DOS game (or VGA/VESA Mode) compatibility, which means it is also suitable for later software mode DOS games such as Duke Nukem 3D or Wing Commander 3.
There is actually no reason for the Voodoo 1 or 2 if you have a Voodoo 3 or 5. Of course it looks different if you already own a Voodoo 2 and have to buy the Voodoo 3 separately. The advantage of the Voodoo 5 would be 32 bit color depth in Glide games.
Great video! I'm very impressed with the Cyrix 5x86! I thought the AMD would run better at 150MHz than 160 due to the higher bus speed, interesting to see it didn't.
I would love to see the results with an SX and the Intel DX4 100MHz with its mighty 16KB L1! And a comparison of 486s!
I have a feeling that the higher clocked core still has an advantage because of a faster FPU. We will see how an SX works and draw some conclusions. Thanks for watching!
Noone I know of used a cyrix 486-100 only AMD and Intel 100mhz, which really is too bad since it seems to be a nice chip.
Any plans for benchmarking with a Pentium 83 OD cpu? Sure its not a 486 but the series is named socket 3 :)
Yes, this video is coming soon. I am waiting for an original Intel fan since I am missing the one on mine. Without the fan, the CPU is limited to a multiplier of 1. I don't want to modify the CPU if I have the option to get such a fan soon.
Cyrix 5x86 was really short living product.
Very nice ❤ I enjoyed your video
Glad you enjoyed it!
Really nice video! What I always wonder is that I never ever saw any YT video using an intel 486 DX4 75Mhz. It has a 25mhz bus but I think it could be overclocked to 33mhz to match the dx4 100mhz
I haven't seen this CPU, but it is easy to downclock the 100 MHz version to 75 MHz. But you will probably end up with performance similar to the DX2-66 CPUs.
I hope you do understand, this test is not so valid, because there is a 30 fps lock in the Benchmark application. But I am happy to see it!
Yes, it would be better if there wasn't a frame cap. However, I do believe that in such a case, the Cyrix 5x86 would do even better!
I am surprised to see the Cyrix outperforming the AMD, as back when we had those CPU's I alwways thought the Cyrixes are the lowest of the bunch just because they where often the cheapest.
Yes, the Cyrix did very well at a much lower clock speed. I wish there would be a possibility to remove the frame cap. I could imagine that the Cyrix would extend its lead significantly over the competition
The first time i finished Tomb raider was on my first pc an intel dx4 100mhz at 320x240.when Voodoo 1 arrived it was way better and I remember very playable at 640x480. Did know the existence of that beast the cyrix 586 but i want to know more and please compare it with the intel dx4 100. Excellent video review as always
There will be two more videos which will hopefully answer all your questions ☺️
Still have a monster 3dfx and matrix mystique card in a p55t2p4 with mmx 200 in closet. Still works. Even the old samsung 1.6gb hdd still runs.
That is a very nice combo! That is actually the same config that I got as a used PC that had a Orchid Righteous 3D in it... I still have all of those parts as well - fully working!
@@bitsundbolts yep its cool they still work yet. Getting up there in age. Did have to swap power supply out.
I had a Cyrix in my old Packard bell pc back in 95.
I wasn't shocked at all, I own a 5x86 clocked at 120mhz and I figured it would be at the top.
Good, then my testing methodology isn't complete garbage 😂. Thanks for watching and confirming!
It works better than I expected :)
Yes! Well, you do need a Voodoo for it, but I think it would be playable with it and one of the faster 486/5x86 CPUs.
@@bitsundbolts Years ago, I tried my Voodoo 1 on a 486 DX 100.
On Quake 1 it was unplayable. But TR1 needs less power.
Well done!
Thank you so much for your support! I really appreciate it and thank you for watching!
Great video, thanks!
Glad you liked it!
In the 90's I had a computer with an AMD 486-100 processor and I overclocked it to 120 to play Tomb Raider (software mode) :)@@bitsundbolts
I know what your experience must have been. But I am sure you enjoyed the game - even in software mode!
The effect of tuning the timings vs auto should also not be underestimated
Interesting video, and what's especially interesting to me is the Cyrix 5x86. I've never played with these in this depth, exploring the enhanced performance is still on my todo list. And it seems those flags can enhance the Cyrix quite a bit.
Btw those 486 boards can do fishy things as FSB increases, going to slower cache and memory timings is just the most obvious of these. Btw I _may_ have one 486 board of the many that possesses cache that can deal with 50MHz at the tightest timings, I found it an exceeeeedingly rare gift! No sets of 15ns nor 12ns, 256k ,512k or 1M chips can do this for me, only (maybe, I'm not even sure) a PCChips M919 cache stick that's incompatible with any other board....
I had much better luck with 40MHz, many chips CAN do 40MHz at 2-1-1-1 timigs, I even found EDO sticks that can be diabolically fast at that clock (single cycle, perhaps?) in a PCChips M918 (ALI chipset). But in other boards, there are many FPM and EDO sticks that are capable the tightest timings of those.
PCI frequency is another can of worms, VGA access can slow down tremendously if a board decides that it must put a /2 divider on the PCI but at 40MHz. Not even a 2/3 one, it goes right to the kill and downclocks it to 20MHz. It's horrible, really. At 50MHz a 2/3 divider should still suffice, but no... Other boards can do 40MHz PCI and many VGAs and the onboard HDD controllers can deal with it. At 50MHz, it's tricky, though cards with AGP versions (like the Riva 128 I love as a quick DOS card) can usually deal with it flawlessly. VLB is an even bigger can of worms :D
All in all, my favorite Am5x86 setting is definitely the 160MHz one, it performs very well, and I even have a permanent build like that. And I'm looking forward to trying the Cyrix 5x86 at 120MHz and pit the two against each other. I have 3 Cyrix parts lying around here, I hope at least one of them can do it....
About the FPU - I guess Tomb Raider won't even start without it, let alone its 3dfx patched version. It has A LOT to calculate and I'm quite sure an FPU was a standard part of a bog standard CPU when it came out so it's most probably heavily relies on it.
i sold and rebuilt every single cpu and video card ever built back in the days i used all these cpus :)
I always felt the original Voodoo card needed a fast Pentium class processor to maximize its potential. Something around 166mhz or faster.
Yes, the benefit of a Voodoo is severely limited by a 486 CPU. In my other Tomb Raider video, I tested a Pentium 133 and we mostly remained at the 30 fps cap. So, yes, you're correct - a fast Pentium is required to get the full potential of a 3Dfx accelerator
I had that setup back in a day :)
Haha, which CPU? I tested six :) But that is hardcore to have a 486 with a Voodoo card. You definitely tried to get the most of socket 3!
@@bitsundbolts I'm not sure it was 30 years ago :) 486 100Mhz with 4MB voodoo.
Fascinating results from the "unlocked" Cyrix 5x86, it would be probably even more fascinating to do a performance scaling comparison with the Cyrix MediaGX based on a similar CPU core... if not for the fact most of the MediaGX systems are probably dead or/and shredded for a gold dust (lol)
Yes, the Cyrix did very well! Unfortunately, I do not have a MediaGX CPU - let alone the required system.
Hopefully one day a working one finds its way to you 😊
They are constrained to hell, but still a fascinating piece of x86 history in my book 😅
Thanks for the video BuB. Interesting to see the CPU limiting the frame rate. Will you try on Intel P166 or P200 MMX to see if you get get to the 30 FPS cap with the T-Rex?
I already have a video on my channel with a P120 and P133 using a Voodoo with 4, 6, and 8MB of memory. Just search for Tomb Raider on my channel and you should find that video - it's about a year old.
Is it possible to run the Cyrix at 2 x 50MHz?
I did not try this yet, but I doubt we will see much difference between 50x2 and 33x3. And this is because the game seems to be heavily FPU limited.
Meine Güte müssen für die Erhebung der Daten viele Stunden drauf gegangen sein! Das war wirklich umfassend und der Cyrix macht richtig was her! Obwohl alle Verbesserungen abgeschaltet waren, zog er den DX4-100 komplett aus. Interessant auchj die Ergebnisse vom großen AMD. 4*40 ist schneller als 3*50. Da hat wohl das Board die Bremse reingehauen.
Ja, beim AMD 150 muss was bremsen. Das Soyo Board hat ein paar Ecken und Kanten. Muss das mal auf einem anderen Board testen welches auch EDO RAM unterstützt
Makes me wonder what other games the cyrix can perform good with amazing how well that did
Enter the Pentium OverDrive!!!!!
Coming soon!
What I would see as interesting is to compare the performance of the 486 CPUs to the PS1, since from my time playing it the game seemed to run at a pretty stable 30FPS with frame drops here and there. I think the fight against the T-Rex was around 20FPS but i never used benchmarking tools it's just my recollection. Might be an idea to put those performance figures into a part of these series? People back in the day sure might have had the consideration of putting out like 300 bucks for a Pentium 2 or 586 or just get a PS1 for cheaper to play the game. Would love to see a comparison!
I wouldn't mind to be the reason to re-ignite the battle between PC and PS1 gamers trying to convince each other that device is better than the other :D Unfortunately, I do not have a PS1. But if someone would offer to send me the uncompressed (*.mkv) footage of the PlayStation, I could analyze it and put it next to some PC footage... Then we would be able to figure out what PC you would need to be on par with Sony's PlayStation.
Cyrix 5x86 was half on its way to fifth generation and had many features pure 486 CPUs in this test missed. That it performs well with that competition should not be surprising (especially with enhancements enabled).
But AMD managed to give it a run for its money with pure 486 tech and enough Mhz.
Had a Cyrix 5x86 100 Mhz system in the early 2000s (saved from the recycling bin) but never used it much. Cyrix was for me always only third class behind Intel and AMD and I remember that some programs were not running at all on it because of compatibilty problems in Cyrix CPUs (6x86?).
Removed the mainboard at some point of time and installed an AMD 5x86 133 Mhz system inside. That computer is with me to this day for occasional retro sessions. ^^
I had an AMD 486-DX4-100 back then. Never even heard of Cyrix back then. It was always Intel or AMD. Well, it was the cheaper alternative for me. And yes, the Cyrix is more advanced having features from the next generation on board. Still nice to have so many different options for this platform.
I had a Cyrix CPU on my first PC. It died. I never knew it was a good processor at its time.
The Cyrix 5x68 is known to be faster than the 486 at the same clock speed. It is more like Pentium Overdrive.
And the last test.
3dfx glide wrapper with other cards from that time.
I had a cyrix 6x86 which I considered pretty crappy so I did not expect the 586 to be any good.
I never had any Cyrix CPU. The 5x86 is the first CPU I am using and it is quite impressive. Based on what you're saying, I will be disappointed by the MII that I will fix some time in the future.