Hi guys. I've been playing the game since it came out using r3Dfx Voodoo 1-2 + nGlide and from the start I've been facing a framerate stupidly unstable. In closed areas the performance is good, around 50-60 fps, but when I am in a open space, and specially when the camera aims at areas with a lot of polygons (be them enemies or scenery) or illumination effects it becomes absolutely unplayable, with the performance dropping to 10-15 fps. I've been able to advance more or less with the knight, but in the orc fortress stage (not sure of the specific name) the problem turned unbearable.

The problem doesn't show if I use Opengl, but to be honest, I think that driver really harms the atmosphere of the game, messing up the textures and making the game too bright. So I'd like to solve the problem with r3Dfx if possible.

Any suggestions?

Only a genuine 3Dfx card or a very fast cpu might solve your problem, 3Dfx works by emulation which is why it is slow, Direct3D and OpenGL calls the hardware in a more direct manner which is why it has acceptable fps.

I use rOpenGL with filtering set to GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR and v-sync turned on which is more or less how I remembered the game to be in terms of graphics.

I haven't tried nglide, but I played the game a few years ago with Zeckensack's Glide wrapper. And that is why it is now very strange for me to hear about these slowdowns with nglide. Zeckensack was very smooth for me.

http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/
http://www.zeckensack.de/glide/archive/GlideWrapper084c.exe

I never had any slowdowns using it, and the game looks beautiful with it. And, yes, I also believe that Opengl kills almost all the atmosphere in this game. In addition, I experienced severe fog and stability issues with Opengl.

Here are the global settings I used with Zeckensack.

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Texture memory : 16mb
Resolution : By app (default)
Refresh rate : 60 Hz (I don't know if you are using a CRT monitor, so your mileage may vary)
Vertical sync : By app (default)
Mipmapping : By app (default)
Lod bias / Anisotropy / Gamma : default
Limit feature set : Most fancy shaders
Render to : Own window (default)
Thread policy : Classic (default)
------------------------------

You'll have to move Nglide's glide2x.dll out of Blade directory, and then install Zeckensack. It places glide2x.dll and glide3x.dll in your Windows directory. So unless there's a specific glide2x from another wrapper inside a game's directory, Zeckensack will run with games that use 3dfx. You can always uninstall it, of course.