housemade benchmarks

Past friday I could make a project -or experiment- that I had in mind for so long. I bought a cheap Geforce4 MX440, agp 8x with 64mb of RAM. And I changed my old ATI RageIIC/4MB with the brand new card!! The best of all is that ... it worked!! Now I can view a lot of demos (specially the ones that really take profit from the accelerated hardware), while I wait for my laptop to be repaired. For the curious people, my old computer specs are: Pentium II 350 MHz, 192 mb RAM, 32GB hd, sblive! and some more peripherals that do not make sense in a graphic benchmarks talk...
The installation and setup was so quick. Just take away the old card, plug the new and it was immediately detected by w98 (oh yeah! old flavour! ;)). I installed the drivers and everything was working instantly.
Of course, then I wanted to test it ... so I went to my demoscenedemos folder and clicked over one random file. The chosen one was "kunetsu", by mac, sml, drkami and others (I don't remember exactly all the members, it was released at some mekka&symposium party, maybe 2001). After a relatively long loading time (just understand it: it's a pII!!) compared to the ridiculous amount of time spent when I played that demo in the Pentium4, I was hoping a system failure or something like that, but IT WORKED!!
I couldn't believe it! So I went for more demos! This way/stravaganza worked almost ok, excepting the first scene with lots of arrows: maybe they were too many arrows for my little pII. Great test too: Medium/einklang.net. It also worked very well. Variform/Kewlers did it too (and I hadn't played it for months so this was a delicious benchmark, nothing to compare with the boring benchmarks that I am used to execute in the work and some serious tasks. I also tested some other demos and intros: please the cookie thing/aardbei (I love that orange color!!) and vip2/popsy team. Last one made my processor suffer a bit in some scenes!!
Then I went for some more: the loser/tlotb. If the computer could play it, then I would consider myself completely satisfied. And ... do you guess? it worked!! woah! tlotb's engine is incredibly optimized. I was astonished by the overall performance of the demo. Yes, it didn't pass very well the particles scene with the daemon in the center (I think it only got 15 fps or so), but what about the rest? lots of vectors moving and interpolating in real time!! incredible!
And that's all about my last experiment. Stay tuned!
Of course, you can download all these demos and intros from pouet.net