Celeron and Voodoo 2 SLI Benchmarks

Unreal / GLQuake / Quake 2

 

On October 12th '98, 3DFX announced a new promotion for Voodoo 2 SLI. As well as new improved drivers, the cost of V2 boards has plummeted. In the UK, a card that originally cost £250 six months ago can now be found for around half this price. As a real power fiend I couldn't resist the temptation. after an unsuccessful attempt at installing a second Orchid card due to a hardware fault, I finally purchased a Metabyte Wicked 3D card. This card allows SLI with any other manufacturer's boards and due to some optimised drivers also gives higher resolutions such as 1024x1024. Metabyte also offer compatibility with H3D specs, you can read a review of how I got on with these here. To see some single V2 results read my Celeron benchmarks page. If you fancy a try at overclocking yourself, please read my Celeron Overclocking Guide.

System Spec:

Abit BX6 motherboard, Intel Celeron 300a (SL2WM OEM Costa Rica), 128Mb Micron Tech PC100 SDRAM (rated up to 125Mhz), Orchid Righteous 3d II 12Mb, Metabyte Wicked 3D 12Mb, IBM Deskstar 8.5Gb UDMA HD, SB AWE64 Value, Matrox Millennium G200, and plenty of other stuff insignificant to performance. It's all crammed into a Super Micro SC501A Midi case which has excellent airflow and rarely goes above 80°f.

How the Benchmarks were run :

All benchmarks were performed with the Celeron 300a clocked at 450Mhz and the Voodoo 2s  Clocked at 98Mhz. This has been totally stable without a single crash. Refresh rate was set in the Voodoo 2 control panel to 75Hz for all resolutions. I have not disabled sound in any of the tests - what's the point? For GLquake and Quake 2 benchmarks I renamed my .cfg files to ensure I was running without tweaks.

Each test was run 5 times, and an average gained from these results. As well as the average I've posted the highest and lowest times gained.

 

Unreal

Flyby Using Timedemo02 from Planetunreal, Default install with MTMU DLL (GlideDrv.DLL) obtained from 3Fingers. Vsync disabled, high quality textures, high quality sound.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480 55.07 55.28 55.23
800x600 52.02 52.39 52.20
1024x768 46.25 46.46 46.35

Note that the high/low FPS figures are for the overall result, not that reported by Timedemo. As Unreal is frame capped, the max FPS rate during timing will always be 64.0 (Unless you have a slower set-up). This frame capping has a major affect on benchmarking an SLI set-up, the timedemo runs at least 2/3 of the flyby at 64fps and therefore none of these results are a good performance indicator. The MTMU DLL improves my 800x600 performance by up to 8fps.Scores were taken from the 'last cycle' display. Note: it is very important when using the Timedemo utility to issue commands from the command line (default is on the TAB key) rather than the console. With the console open, frame rate can double. I have also tried Unreal using the Celeron clocked at 464 with 2nd Level Cache disabled. This results in a drop of 3fps at 800x600 over cache enabled at 450.

 

GLQuake

Demo1 Using GLQuake 0.97 default install, Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
512x384 203.5 203.8 203.7
640x480 185.0 185.4 185.2
800x600 139.5 139.5 139.5
1024x768 91.4 91.5 91.4

Note: I've put in the 512x384 resolution result just to show how quick this can go!! In fact the console screen has hardly reached the top of the screen by the time the demo has ended. With a single Voodoo 2 card this resolution achieves around 160 fps.

Demo2 Using GLQuake 0.97 default install, Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480 186.5 186.8 186.6
800x600 137.2 137.3 137.3
1024x768 88.5 88.5 88.5

 

Quake2

Demo1 Using default install and patched all the way to 3.19. Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480 101.2 101.5 101.3
800x600 97.8 98.1 98.0
1024x768 76.0 76.1 76.1

Massive1 Using default install and patched all the way to 3.19. Vsync disabled.

Resolution Low FPS High FPS Average FPS
640x480 83.2 83.2 83.2
800x600 82.6 82.7 82.7
1024x768 72.1 72.3 72.1

Note: These are without any tweaks. Much higher figures can be reached using 3Fingers tweak guide.

 

Useful Links

Well there's no way I could have worked out how to do any of this overclocking business on my own. Here's a quick run down of useful sites to get you started.

Tom's Hardware Guide - An excellent place to start, make sure you read through the Delphi message forum too.
Anandtech - Covers everything that Tom's does. Never hurts to have an alternate view.
BX Boards Page - Formerly the Unofficial Abit BX6 page. Essential reading.
3Fingers - Numerous tools and benchmarking utilities. Home of the Quake tweaking guides.
3dfx.products.voodoo2 newsgroup. One of the busiest of all newsgroups - read it regularly.
Andrei Osnovich's Home Page - Want to use different brands of Voodoo 2 cards together in SLI? Andrei has the drivers you need.

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