i just don't get it...

[aNtHrAx323]

why is it that all these Celery and Pentium 2 users are getting 40% to 50% performance increases with the TurboGL driver? the K6-IIIs have MMX, plus 3Dnow! and i am only getting about a 10% performance increase. i don't get it! 3Dnow! has always provided a more dramatic performance increase than MMX, why is it all of a sudden changing? did Matrox just put a half-ass job into the K6-x portion of the TurboGL driver? and yes, it is installed. i'm not that stupid. is there any way i can override the 3Dnow! and make it use the MMX so i can see for myself? the K6-III has twice as much on-chip L2 cache as the Celery, and it's running at full speed, like the Celery, and my system posts scores better than a Celery 450 on Norton SI (i get a 220.6 with my K6-III 400 @ 112x4.0). what's up with that?

also, when Quake3 is starting, in that little blue console window there is a processor detection line. it detects my processor as a Pentium 2/MMX CPU. in all the test versions of Quake3, my processor was detected as an "AMD K6-x, 3Dnow! processor". my performance was also a lot better with Q3Test 1.08. can i manually enable the 3Dnow! instruction set for Quake3? PLEASE help me with this.

thanks a ton for your help.

------------------
-Campbell "aNtHrAx323" Krueger
anthrax32@yahoo.com

System specs:
AMD K6-III 400 at 112x4.0 at 2.3V
Asus P5A
96 MB SD-RAM (the old 66 MHz... stable enough tho =)
Matrox G400 AGP 32MB Dual-Head
Diamond Sonic Impact S90 PCI
Linksys LNE100TX WOL PCI Ethernet adapter
Processor is a peltier/Alpha cooling combo, avg. temp is around 85 F.

http://anthrax.home.texas.net

[jackzod]

The 40% performance boost is at lower res, i.e. 800x600 and lower, at 1024 and above the performance gain is more in the 7 to 15% increase.
I don't know if you did your benchmark at lower res or not. If it's the case, it seems that Matrox have made a good job of using the Celeron cache.

[vanguardian1]

I'd love to help, but I'm not a Quake 3 player......

Uh...what BIOS revision are you using? (I had a K6-3/450@500 on a P5A b4 I got an athlon500/msi6167 )

[Nuno]

anthrax: as for the expected performance boost, listen to what jackzod says.

is there any way i can override the 3Dnow! and make it use the MMX so i can see for myself?

You are a bit confused there. MMX is SIMD instructions for integer calculations, SSE and 3dnow are SIMD for floating point. MMX isn´t of much (if any) help to 3d rendering, wich is a very intensive fpu task. Not only MMX doesn´t do nothing to speed up floating point calculations, but also it can´t be used at the same time as the fpu. Even changing between MMX mode and x87 fpu mode give a major cpu performance hit. That´s why MMX never has got many use anyway.

It´s not very clear however how the turbogl gives such a dramatic performance increase at low res. K6 has 3dnow, but with celeron/P II, I can only think of a MCD highly optimized for the P6 core structure...

Oh, and just one more thing. I think Q3 doesn´t use any 3dnow instructions. It is highly SSE optimized (maybe Intel payed them more ), and that´s one reason why the coppermines are beating Athlons in Q3 benchmarks.

[This message has been edited by Nuno (edited 27 December 1999).]

[aNtHrAx323]

but why is it that in the test versions of Quake3 3Dnow! K6-x CPUs had their own class upon startup? now in the full it is detected only as a p2 class CPU.

------------------
-Campbell "aNtHrAx323" Krueger
anthrax32@yahoo.com

System specs:
AMD K6-III 400 at 112x4.0 at 2.3V
Asus P5A
96 MB SD-RAM (the old 66 MHz... stable enough tho =)
Matrox G400 AGP 32MB Dual-Head
Diamond Sonic Impact S90 PCI
Linksys LNE100TX WOL PCI Ethernet adapter
Processor is a peltier/Alpha cooling combo, avg. temp is around 85 F.

http://anthrax.home.texas.net

[Vinegar]

maybe the turbogl give such improvements in the celery and PIII b/c it doesn't intensively use the SSE instructions. Maybe that's why both the celerons and PIII get such great improvements. I've ran Q3 test on both PIII and Celerons of similar speed (~558 (PIII) & 567 (Celeron)) and the PIII surpass the celerons at most by ~7/8 fps, but only at low quality. If in fact the turbogl is more highly optimized for the PIII/PII/Celeron core, that would explain why the K-6x are doing as well.

[kjliew]

Can anyone post results on

Quake2 demo1
640x480x16bpp and 800x600x16bpp 75Hz
gl_swapinterval 0
gl_ext_swapinterval 0
(No other gl_ or r_ switches...)

Comparing 400MHz clocked K6-2, K6-3, Pentium II and celeron using TurboGL.