[t800]

I was wondering out of curiosity what weakest computer specs would be able to run original Duke Nukem 3D v. 1.3D at playable framerate at 320x200 screen resolution, maximally shrinked screen view, low details, no shadows and disabled mouse aiming? I am interested because I firstly played Duke 3D on Pentium I (but I cant remember GPU and RAM) so I wasnt forced to run game at such low graphical settings. Official lowest system requirements are as specified as 486 and 8MB RAM, but I presume these were calculated for VGA, high details and defaultly enlarged screen, so would it be able to utilize even weaker PC for fluent gameplay?

[High Treason]

I tried it on a 40 MHz 486SX in this video (31:54) with settings pretty much maxed and it worked fairly well... Has a rather speedy 2MB TSeng ET4000 W32p VLB VGA card though (STB Lightspeed) and an unusually fast CPU for an SX-class 486, that being the U5S-Super40. There is also 16MB of low latency FPDRAM, 256KB L2 Cache and very quick timings however.

Might take a couple of days, but I'm kinda curious myself so I think I'll give it a shot with an Intel 25MHz SX and possibly an older 386 box which uses a Cyrix 486DLC-40 but I have an AM386DX-40, can run either at 33MHz too on the Shuttle board I have. That has an ISA ET4000 in it, but I am unclear if I can get the game to start in it's puny 4MB of RAM, I really need to upgrade that.

I'd be willing to bet that the Am286-6MHz with it's Everex Viewpoint (EGA/VGA combo card) and 640K RAM isn't going to run it though...

[Tea Monster]

Duke wouldn't run for me at all on a 386, even with a co-pro.
Strangely enough, Quake would, but at literally 1FPS.

[High Treason]

How odd, must make use of some 486-exclusive instruction perhaps. I'm not sure Duke uses a coprocessor, not being polygonal and lacking things like perspective correction indicate it is mostly if not fully integer-based, I cold be wrong however. If I get the 386 box to run it I shall try turning the FPU (IIT 4C87DLC-40) off and see what happens to it.

Can't resist... It's not here yet, but I wonder if this will run it;


Almost an entire 486 on a single chip at 66MHz, made by SGS Thomson (ST) - wonder if it's the same as the Cyrix 486 just like the regular SGS ones were of if they tweaked anything by the time they did this circa 1999.

[MetHy]

With a 486 DX4 100mhz I could run it at 320*200 at LOWEST video settings. So, the lowest of all. I don't remember if I had 8mb of memory at the time or 20mb (I used to have 8 then we upgraded to 20)

I'm pretty sure you'd need a pentium 100 with at least 20mb of ram to run it smoothly at 640*480 at high video settings; which is the minimum for comfortable gameplay.

[MusicallyInspired]

Runs good on my 486 DX2 66Mhz. Bit choppy, but certainly playable. That's at 320x200 with a Trident VLB card and 12MB RAM.

[Hank]

This question brings back memories

We ran multiplayer in my office on 486s with a good video card, I forgot the name for them. At home, Build ran best on this VESA mode, again on a 486 but with straight DOS 6.2/Windows 3.11, not much luck with Windows 95/98.

Thus I say, in DOS/Win3.1 with a 486, Duke ran half decent on 600x480, as soon you switched to Windows 95 and up, you needed the better computers, or frankly, a better port.

[High Treason]

DOS 6.22, Ti 486DLC-40MHz, IIT 4C87DLC-40, 8MB SIMM RAM at 70ns, TSeng ET4000 W32i ISA with no VESA Driver loaded.

It is not really playable, I can capture video from it if you want (direct from VGA just like that video I linked, no cameras pointed at screens) though I want to first try with a VESA 2.0 driver (SDD 7) and a few other adjustments such as disabling the audio and whatnot.

I don't think it's worth trying the 386 chip in this machine as the 486DLC is a 386 upgrade - essentially a 486 in a 386 socket so generally faster.

[Tea Monster]

With the Win9X series, you drop to DOS, run your game then type 'Win' at the command prompt.
I think there was a way in properties to tell the game to automatically do that, but It's been a while.

[Hendricks266]

High Treason, on 29 June 2014 - 09:22 AM, said:

How odd, must make use of some 486-exclusive instruction perhaps. I'm not sure Duke uses a coprocessor, not being polygonal and lacking things like perspective correction indicate it is mostly if not fully integer-based,

The original BUILD source is completely integer-based.

[The Commander]

Does this qualify?

[LeoD]

Hendricks266, on 29 June 2014 - 11:04 AM, said:

The original BUILD source is completely integer-based.

That's why my AMD 486@133MHz could easily outrun the early Pentiums at 75 and even 100MHz.

[Ahcruna]

I had try try this out too. Just for fun.

With an Intel 486 SX 25 and S3 Trio the frame rate ran at an average of 3-5 on full screen with all settings set to low, and at it's peak it rendered about 18 frames. (Hollywood Holocaust)
At the minimum size of the screen I got an average of 3-7 and a max of 22 frames. note that the max values had the camera pointed straight in to a wall.
Moving sectors (like exploding walls) and mirrors broke the fps though. To be honest, at least the first level is playable

Just for the heck of it I tried to boot up life's a beach and I think I got about 1 frame every 3 second in some places

Other than the cpu and video card, I really haven't looked up the specs on the stuff I'm using, but almost all the stuff I have came from discarded OEM computers, so I'm guessing it not top notch stuff.
In fact, probably garbage.

I have a Deskpro 386/20e, but at the moment I have no means to install Duke on that, not enough space and no CD drive, I don't want to crack it open to use other means.
The plastic front on that thing is disintegrating by itself, I have no idea if the previous owner threw something on it, but I've never seen that before, not at that extreme at least.
I'm just gonna leave it alone, or maybe I'll try and install Duke Shareware some other day.

[MetHy]

Another question now somewhat similar, what would be a good setup that would be able to run every Build engine game smoothly under DOS at high resolutions ? (800*600 or 1024*768)

I mean, the minimum specs requirements that would be able to do that.
Is Blood the most demanding?

[High Treason]

Blood is an absolubte hog and I can't give a definite answer. Between a Pentium II 450 with a Matrox Productivia G100 4MB and a K6-2-550 with Rage Fury Pro 32MB the P2 is actually slightly quicker at 640x480.

My Athlon 1500+ with a GeForce 4 MX440 still gets the odd lag spike at 1024x768 in Blood. I also think it's a bit quick for the ISA BUS as by that point the audio doesn't always work when you start the game - that machine is running an AWE 64 Gold. The others are running a Yamaha YM724 (P2) and probably a Vibra 16 (K6) but I am unsure on the last one as the K6 didn't like any card I tried to use with it and can't be bothered to look at it. I suspect the Pentium III might be a slightly faster platform for DOS games with the correct chipset, regardless of it's Windows performance.

All of these machines seem to run pretty much all Build games very well overall, of course, the K7 takes it. You would be able to upgrade that to an obscure revision of the 2600 on a slower BUS than most 2600+ chips had, but the chances of getting it working are slim and the chances of upgrading further are almost nil as you'd have to set up a newer motherboard lacking ISA, an bridge/adapter could be used but PCI lacks several functions relied on by the SoundBlaster and code that ran it... Some P3 boards still had an SB Link by that time which you could use with something like the Yamaha 724 though, but they would probably be hard to find. I have never seen an AMD board with that feature but they may have existed at some point.

SuperMicro made a Pentium 4 board with ISA slots, probably just on a bridge, but I do wonder how that would fare as a DOS rig. By that time CPUs weren't well optimized but the brute force of the chip might pull it through.

[Ahcruna]

Not sure what the exact hardware for smooth play is but my Pentium III 1.4GHZ with a Banshee AGP, SB 512 and 512 RAM runs all the Build games like a dream. I remember building a Pentium 4 rig for classic gaming, but it gave me a ton of problems when it came to DOS stuff.

[MetHy]

High Treason, on 30 June 2014 - 04:40 PM, said:

My Athlon 1500+ with a GeForce 4 MX440 still gets the odd lag spike at 1024x768 in Blood.

Ahcruna, on 30 June 2014 - 04:53 PM, said:

Not sure what the exact hardware for smooth play is but my Pentium III 1.4GHZ with a Banshee AGP, SB 512 and 512 RAM runs all the Build games like a dream. I remember building a Pentium 4 rig for classic gaming, but it gave me a ton of problems when it came to DOS stuff.

Ah, so one shouldn't go too retro to make an ultimate Build machine!
I remember I had a 500mhz computer (don't remember what exactly at all) which ran Duke3D smoothly at 800*600 so I thought something like that would be enough!

Anyway if I stumble upon something like on a flea market I might have a try, hoping the thing works. I'd a bit sick of having to use dosbox for Redneck Rampage Rides Again, Blood and Powerslave.

[Daedolon]

I think I'm running Blood at 800x600 with my 633Mhz Intel Celeron with 192MB of RAM and a Voodoo 3 2000 16MB without trouble.

[Ahcruna]

In actuality it really depends on what resolution you want to play the game on.

Like it's been said before, you can run the games on stuff like DX4, 5x86's and up depending on the resolution.
I'm not sure how well my PIII run's the games at 1600 x 1200 because I have no screen that supports that resolution, but below that it all runs smooth.

Redneck Rampage can get some flickering at random moment ( I have no idea what causes it) but there is no slowdown when that happens.
Duke Nukem 3D, Blood and Shadow Warrior all run perfect through and through.

[Tea Monster]

A mate of mine ran Duke on a 486 DX4 and it got laggy on large custom maps, but would play the game relatively well at 800 x 600 res. I don't see why you would want anything more than a PII or a P1 266 to play the game.

Using an Athlon is like killing a fly with an atomic bomb.

[MrBlackCat]

I wish I could remember all the specs I ran Duke 3D on... I know I ran it on some 804086's back in the day... I did have an IBM Blue Lightening I think was the 50Mhz version that would run it, but I don't remember the performance. I was getting Pentiums by then, but still had several high end 486's with PCI Bus. (66's and 100's) The high-end 486's ran it fine in VESA 800x600.

[Corvin]

I ran duke on 386 but I only stayed to watch it play for 10 mins. The Slopes require a math co-processor so I assumed it crashed after awhile.

The 386 looked pretty old so I doubt it had one.

[Hendricks266]

Corvin, on 08 July 2014 - 08:11 PM, said:

The Slopes require a math co-processor so I assumed it crashed after awhile.

What kind of coprocessor? Certainly not floating-point.

[MrFlibble]

Now my memory is quite fuzzy and might be playing tricks on me, but... When we had IT classes at school we had some really old second-hand PCs (and this was somewhere around 1998 or even 1999 already). I think they might have been 386s or 486s - I can't tell for sure, but back then I had an impression they were 386s (perhaps with custom modifications by previous users). Anyway, those were DOS machines, and some of them, if not all, had shareware Doom and Duke3D. I remember both running quite fine (with Duke3D at default resolution). I remember that some of my more tech savvy classmates even played Doom through LAN.

The thing is, these old machines got replaced at some point with then-modern PCs (Pentiums I suppose), which had Windows NT (maybe Windows 2000), but we would still often boot into DOS mode to do the stuff we were learning (the basics of C++ etc.). So maybe I'm confusing things and Doom and Duke3D were played already on the new machines (there's this comparison video, and as I remember Doom certainly ran a lot faster than what is shown for 386DX).

[Corvin]

@Hendricks: I'm not sure, I think the interrupts where required cause Ken S. said he ran out of them.

[MrBlackCat]

We played DooM on a LAN many hours, at good (not excellent) frame rates on nothing but 386's... but I can't remember the specs beyond that. I THINK they were 40Mhz as high as that sounds... Maybe they were AMD's?
By the time Duke Nukem 3D was out, I had my Home LAN and faster machines, so we didn't play at work anymore. Ahh... the LAN Party years.

MrBlackCat

[t800]

I am just layman at technical aspects of Duke 3D renderer and when I played Duke for very first time I was too young to understand or to remember any technicalities of my then rig or configuration of game I was using back then (but I think I had everything set to default).

But am I not mistaken here that I am beginning to think that using smallest screen view and low details have very negligible effect on overall performance or is just so that nobody had nerves back then to try it at such low graphical details?

[MetHy]

t800, on 10 July 2014 - 02:29 AM, said:

But am I not mistaken here that I am beginning to think that using smallest screen view and low details have very negligible effect on overall performance or is just so that nobody had nerves back then to try it at such low graphical details?

Oh no it made a huge difference. I could only play the game at details set to 'low'.
Then I remember some usermap that was laggy even then; and reducing the size of the screen helped a lot.

Man I must have really liked the game to play in such shitty conditions. Guess I must still really like it since I'm still here. One of the first things I did when we upgraded to a newer computer was to finally play Duke3D with good video settings.

[Ahcruna]

MrFlibble, on 09 July 2014 - 10:31 AM, said:

I think they might have been 386s or 486s - I can't tell for sure, but back then I had an impression they were 386s (perhaps with custom modifications by previous users). Anyway, those were DOS machines, and some of them, if not all, had shareware Doom and Duke3D. I remember both running quite fine (with Duke3D at default resolution).

That sounds odd, yet very interesting. I've never seen any 386 play Duke Nukem 3D at a playable rate.
Like I mentioned before, I do have a 386 but it's slower than the 486SX 25mhz I tried Duke3D on. Not sure if it's even playable on that thing, but I could try to load up the shareware today.

Not getting my hopes up on it actually being playable though, hehe

[EDIT]

If it does run I can do a cellphone recording of it (oh, I don't have any sort of video capturing card).

[Kyanos]

It will run on a 386. I had the shareware game running on my PS/1 as a kid. I can't quite remember much about it, but I know my buddies had 486's which handled Duke, while mine was a 386sx and had lag but I played and beat it. It used sVGA graphics, and Windows 3.1 ran on it.

Looked a lot like this, I couldn't find a pic to match the model I had.