Mail Archives: opendos/1997/05/13/22:04:41
On Wed, 14 May 1997, Leath Muller wrote:
> It depends... :) To give an example Quake runs at 28 FPS on my computer
> in a window at 640x480 under 95/NT 4, and at the same resolution runs at 14 FPS
> under DOS... (it doesn't really do that, but thats another story... ;)
> Anyway, the point is DirectX is designed to use hardware acceleration
> transparently on all machines running DirectX, something DOS can't keep up
> with. Of course, DirectX sux but thats something else... :) I think its
> important to remember Win95 _is_ basically a 32bit DOS extended program (that
> being a _very_ loose statement... :)
I agree that DirectX confers some advantages regarding unified access to
hardware (sound, video, keyboard, network and so on), thus transparently
using hardware acceleration where possible.
But given hardware not prone to hardware acceleration very much (like an
old Trident card for example), DOS will bury DirectX deep into the ground,
because DOS doesn't multitask, the game have 100% of the CPU time to
render the screens. A 16-bit DOS program technically *is* faster than a
32-bit Windows program (or even a Linux program!), because it runs like a
crazed devil, without any scheduling to slow it down or steal it of
precious CPU time... So if you devise a similar driver system for a 32-bit
single tasking OS (like an improved OpenDOS), you'd get stellar
performance even from specialized hardware.
There's a Quake version for S3 ViRGE chipsets, this is what you should
compare a WinQuake using DirectX 3.0 drivers, on the same system (using a
ViRGE video card, of course!).
Pierre Phaneuf
- Raw text -