posted 06-17- 05:08 PM               

After a little struggle I got myself a Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 graphics card and to acompany it, a CPU upgrade (Celeron 700E on a slotket). I've been running a Celeron 433 MHz on an Abit BX6-2 board and a Matrox G-200 graphics card. A fresh and slim Windoze 95 OSR 2.1 installation.

After serious problems with flash upgrading the motherboard I was finally able to use the new CPU. In my benchmark the fps went up from 26-7 to 38-9.

Enter the Kyro II.

First impressions: can't see the fps display, bugger. I was to impatient to tweak the monitor settings.

Scramble, scramble! All in the max resolution of 1280 by something (?). It happened to be a dogfight in the clouds with 6 FW-190s. The colours produced by this card are more vibrant than those of G-200, a big plus! No more wash out, gray-ish ground. The dogfight was a blast, I haden't flown for some time and was really absorbed. Noticed some jerking (fps decrease) when more planes appeared in front of me.

Next, I got out of the game, readjusted the monitor and back to SDOE benchmark (B-17 take-off training, chase view, 800x600 res., everything maxed out).
Now, a big disapointment: the fps everages now lower than with the Matrox. Now it oscilates around 36-38 fps. I don't believe it, but seeing is believing.

Another suprise. I took time to fly and look at things this time. The edges of the runways are clearly defined now. The ground look weird though. The gradient in the ground representation the G-200 was displaing is gone. Now there is unpleasant (to my eye) banding as if the number of colours was limited. Admitedly, from greater height the desert terrain looks as if it was covered by this special, patchy vegetation, all in somehow "blocky" manner now.

If the blockiness of terrain has its "charm" then the water texture (its less grey-ish tone aside) now looks decidedly worse. The surface is not smooth, it doesn't have an appearance of fluid.

I deleted the texture caches, tried enforcing 4X4 antialiasing which resulted in some improvement, nothing breath taking though.

All in all I have rather mixed feeling, getting a new CPU is a bonus (although I migh have been better off gettin a new Duron/board combo plus a cheap GF2 MX video card). The overall effect, I feel doesn't justify spending those 500 PLN ( some US$ 125). I will try the newest drivers but don't hold much hope. Is there something else I could try?

Cheers

posted 06-17- 05:18 PM               

Fingers crossed for you Poniat.

~Nat~

posted 06-17- 05:20 PM               

If you are running the patch, run in OpenGl and see if you notice a difference. Most of us prefer OpenGl to D3D.

Windows 95 is pretty old, perhaps there are some features on the new card that it can't take advantage of.

Drivers can make a big difference.

posted 06-17- 05:58 PM               

The OpenGl screansvers crash with this card. I haven't installed the patch yet.

Re raising the resolution, I have to run the benchmark in in the same resolution I did benchmarking with the G-200 otherwise there is no comparison.

Re Windoze 95, there's no guarantee it will improve things drastically. This would raise cost of the whole undertaking too high.
I'll go and try tweak it.

Good luck to all you 3D fliers!

posted 06-17- 07:07 PM               

After a few weeks of searching, I found out today that this board will support up to PIII 1 gig after all, although it has to be the 100 FSB version, which means a return to slot 1 I guess. Anyway, I love this motherboard, so if something like that might help, just letting you know it is possible.

------------------
nealg=FC=

posted 06-17- 10:24 PM               

I had a prob with the refresh rate on my cheapo monitor. I set it to optimal and it got better. I added the latest drivers, resized my screen to 1152x864 and it all went away.

The colors were different...I mean way different so be prepared to adjust your monitor and gamma to get it right. To illustrate what I mean, I made a quickie Korean texture for Bavaria when I had the Voodoo 3 installed. The colors were more or less olive tones with tan specks...use your imagination, with the new card, the colors changed to deep greens and dark browns...more jungle than anything I've seen.

My machine is a PIII 500 with 256 ram, so FR were never a major prob. I notice no change EXCEPT with 512+ resolution skins. They go way down from a 55 in flat ass Stalingrad to about 20 in D3D. Worse in OGL. This is also with all the options in SDOE turned up and default settings in the cards setup. BTW, the test mission was Mig3 vs 109g...only 512 texture I had was for the Mig.

That "banding" that was mentioned is really only present for me on the fast prop. I can kind of see it in the terrain textures but, I had a touch of it with the Voodoo card as well.

One thing that kills me is I have ZERO fog in OGL and very lttle in D3D. I tried the settings and I can get plenty fog in version 1.5 but, nothing in the patched.

All in all, I think I have a bit more tweaking to do. Its a good card but, I'm not 100% sold yet...thank God for return desks.

posted 06-18- 04:10 AM               

I've done some research too. What puzzled me was all those saying: it officially supports up to 700 PIIIs and 600 Cels but after updating BIOS it should work up to [sky's the limit].
I understand that a BIOS update is necessary to flash that support for the Streaming SSMs whatsits. Otherwise it just doesn't seem to make any difference. My Celeron seems to be reckognised by software as (running at?) 700 MHz. The increase in fps (some 1.6 times) corresponds with the increase in closk speed (700/433). Confusing stuff.

I wanted to get a slot one PIII for my BX6 (bless her ) but they are hard to come by here. I spent days searching for a mail order company Statesside who would ship to this part but I found no one .

Now, if you could read my post in the 56 long thread about "Video cards for SDOE", I would like to ask you which BIOS version do you have, is it the QR? This seemed to be busted or rejected somehow by this board. The guys at tech support in the store finally managed to flash it with the second most up to date (NW, I think, I'm at wor right now).

Please, could say something cheerul now, it's Monday morning for chrissake!

Cheerfulcheers

posted 06-18- 02:34 PM               

I like the program very much, it's dead easy to run, just double click on the icon.

It finds a bug outright, when I run it it says:

BUG!
blablablabla

Note the above numbers and send the report to [don't remember who].

It fixes a lot, it fixes blind belief in the wonders of the Internet

Got the newest drivers, installed DirectX 8a, tried this, tried that, OpenGL screensavers still don't work, the ground in SDOE looks as stupid as before the "tweaks'.

Gotta find something to kick....

Cheers

posted 06-18- 03:38 PM               

Nealg, could you do me a favour and try to benchmark your SDOE setup?

I'm running a fresh istall plus:

Official patch ver. 1.5
Plane Pack 6.0, nothing else

In DISPLAY setup I select everything, texture details: max
object details: max
resolution: 800x600.
Next, Training
US
B-17
Taking Off
all on screen display off
Chase view (F3), that's all

The frame rate I get oscilates aroud 38 f/s

This is with the default settings on the video card.

Matrox G-200 gave the same results, give or take one frame.

posted 06-18- 03:48 PM               

Duron 900@1Ghz (112mhzFSB)
Voodoo3 2000 PCI
196mbRAM PC100
D3D @800x600
B17F Training Takepoff mission (runway only)
F3 view = 36FPS

posted 06-18- 04:17 PM               

It seems like its D3D just sucks eggs.
I'm pretty sure I remember that the OGL was alot better.

People in the GPL community arn't too impressed with it either. and are having frame rate problems. Seems like kyro needs to come out with some decent drivers to raise D3D performance. I'll keep my eyes on it to see how it looks when its time to buy a card, hopefully the D3D will be better.

How disapointing.

Guess I'll use this banshee a little longer, It hits the 90s in SDOE at times, Not very often and just sky but still. 50s and 60s arn't a problem.

It just has problems when there is a ton of planes out front of me, and I still think thats a CPU problem more then a vid card problem.

posted 06-18- 06:16 PM            

49-52 fps flickering fast

on Athlon 850 (slot A) and Geforce 256 SDR

posted 06-18- 09:17 PM               

After the reinstall of the V3, I figured I just cant run SDOE without Glide. It just plain WORKS.

Anyone interested in selling me their Voodoo5??? I'm serious.

posted 06-18- 09:49 PM               

I haven't done the B17 yet, but in OpenGL, patch .9, in cockpit of the Spit, I get about 30-40 fps. In the Mustang, in cockpit, it shoots up to the high 40's and into 50. Externals for both go up into the 60's - 70's. All detail maxed, 800x600, with clouds on, offline, Training. I have no idea why the difference, I use the standard plane cockpits that are in the par files/plane packs.

With 1.5 and PP 6.0 I only ran in Glide; tried D3D but it is way too dark. However, I know the frames, even online, were very high. Wasn't unusual to see near 100 occasionally, with little going on. Same with D3D when I tried it. But I did have detail down about 1/4. Give me a few days to try the other, I will let you know.

------------------
nealg=FC=

posted 06-19- 02:50 AM               

Did some BIOS and driver settings tweaking.

After installing the 7.103 drivers two days ago (last night I discovered there are 7.111 on the web site) I noticed a strange effect on the turning propeller image: it is sliced horizontally and the slices are offset, it's all blickering and the levels of the slice lines are changing fast. Another thing is a line running accross the screen as if some fog range delimitation. It sometimes shows sometimes not.

On the bright side. I installed their colour calibration thingie. Now, for the first time I can see the panel and read and actually use the instruments in flight.

The ground still looks ugly as sin (well, almost, I never sinned so I wouldn't know )

The speed they are releasing new drivers leads me to conclusion somebody is using me as a beta tester without asking first. Were you asked?