Tomb Raider (1996) on Socket 3 with 3Dfx Voodoo (Part 6) 

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.

This is such a pleasant series. Back in DOS days I didn't have an accelerator, and then in 1999 went with Matrox, only migrating to Nvidia after 3DFX was dead, having missed out on the brand entirely,. In games I always saw Glide modes that for me were permanently disabled, like lens flares in Wing Commander 5. In later years, I came across many 3DFX cards at thrift stores (and bought them all). I have most models, except the 3000, I think. Even have the 5500 AGP version, that I value dearly. I have my Voodoo's all running on P3 boxes. The 486's I use rely on standalone VLB videocards (S3 and Trident). Electromyne I have used in the past. Bought a GeForce3 card from them as a parts spare for one I already owned. It ended up being in better condition, than one I was going to fix, so I just switched to it instead. Selection is spotty. You'll rarely find exactly what you're looking for, but it's worth to be checking back regularly and browsing, because their inventory updates frequently.

Very nice result from the Cyrix 5x86!

that cyrix is a beast!

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

loved the whole series thx.

Oh man this brings back memories! Excellent stuff!

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, would love to see more video comparisons like this. Cheers!

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!

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.

Series still goin, great! :D

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.

Fantastische Arbeit, informativ, umfassend und spannend.

Excellent video, a lot of hours and effort put in.

Very interesting benchmarks, like!

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.

I really was not expecting such a strong showing for Cyrix

Very nice, would love to see more comparisons!

Excellent work mate

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 ;-)!

Think I've said this before, but I'll say it again for the RU-vid Algo. These are really great. Thanks for your hard work!

Awesome, doing a small build and this should fill in that time nicely :D

Yes MOAR testing!!!

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

Very nice ❤ I enjoyed your video

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.

Definitely need to do a 486 cpu benchmark video.😊

very much needed clock speeds displayed too hehe loved your stats from other videos

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!

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

Can't wait for the Overdrive result!!!

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...

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.

*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.

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 😅

Great video, thanks!

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".

Incredible work - must have taken ages to gather all the data!

Well done!

THE socket 3 benchmark! Great to see the performance increase going from CPU to CPU! Cyrix is impressive indeed!

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.

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

A 486 benchmark video would be great!

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🎉

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.

Finally the 3dfx came into the picture

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. ;)

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.

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

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 ....

Yes, I would like to see the other cpu charts.. thanks..

It works better than I expected :)

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.

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!

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.

This is such an underrated channel. I hope this statement doesn't hold true for too much longer! Love the tweaking and overclocking on obscure and old CPUs. At the time, I'd never have thought Cyrix would outperform their equivalent AMD components...

Do you have any of the late model AMD 486DX2's/DX4's such as the V16BGC that actually have an AM5x86 core? If so could you do a comparison of the same clock speed but different bus speeds such as 4*25, 3*33 and 2*50MHz?

I had that setup back in a day :)

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. 👍

When i bought an Orchid Righteous 3D 3Dfx, i had a Pentium 166, so no problem with frame rate. 30 fps rock solid.

i want to know if other optimization help even without the visual enhancements. i played at loke 640x400 that made everything bigger... it stretched to fit the screen. these days with higher resolutions your mostly shooting pixels... or they dont even render... lol

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 :)

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 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.

I had a Cyrix in my old Packard bell pc back in 95.

Also curious to see what the impact would be on other software rendering titles like Quake and Duke Nukem 3D

I missed it if it was in the video, but is 3DFX tomb raider limited to only 640x480? I recall playing other 3dfx games at lower resolutions when my CPU couldn't keep up at 480.

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

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.

Makes me wonder what other games the cyrix can perform good with amazing how well that did

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!

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.

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...

Interesting results. I never played Tomb Raider in Glide mode but I remember the original Grand Theft Auto ran like crap in 640x480 on my P54 133 and my voodoo card clocked to 58 mhz. I always played it at 512x384(I think, it's been nearly 30 years) and ran quite smooth. I wonder if this res is available and make any difference in these tests, ot is it cpu bound.

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.

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.

Is it possible to run the Cyrix at 2 x 50MHz?

Could you carry out the test again with a Rendition Verite V1000 or better V2x00 videocard and the same CPUs? The Rendition Verite V1000 was the first usable T&L videocard for gamers.

Was the AMD 586 done with write through or write back? They are capable of write back with the proper setting, often a jumper in the board, which likely just activates a certain pin on the CPU that might could be tied manually to the proper signal. Also, I'd like to see the pentium overdrives added to this list. Yes, technically not a 486, but running on a 486 board. I think you can also switch between WT and WB caching on it too. So we can see how it fares on the same hardware at similar speeds. How much do you think the architecture will help? Or the 32kb? l1 cache size? Or the improved fpu?

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.

The effect of tuning the timings vs auto should also not be underestimated

would loved to see the pentium overdrive too, but I suppose you still havent found a cooler fan to it right ?

I wasn't shocked at all, I own a 5x86 clocked at 120mhz and I figured it would be at the top.

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 sold and rebuilt every single cpu and video card ever built back in the days i used all these cpus :)

Nice video, i think u need to compare results with pentium overdrive to see the impact of fpu

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.

nice 🙂

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.

I always felt the original Voodoo card needed a fast Pentium class processor to maximize its potential. Something around 166mhz or faster.

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.

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)