TDM in The News

[jaxa]

The Dark Mod running on an Elbrus-8SV with a Radeon RX 580:

11:30 in the video, mission start at 12:52

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/russian-made-elbrus-cpus-gaming-benchmarks-posted

Quote

 

YouTube channel Elbrus PC Play put the Elbrus-8SV through its paces in some childhood classic titles, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The reviewer paired the Elbrus-8SV processor with 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory and an aging Radeon RX 580. The test system was on Russia's domestic Elbrus OS 7.1 operating system, based on Linux 5.4.

The Elbrus-8SV ran The Dark Mod pretty well, delivering frame rates between 30 FPS and 60 FPS at low settings. The chip had no problems with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, either. But, again, the frame rates oscillated between 30 FPS and 200 FPS, depending on the complexity of the scenes.

 

[AluminumHaste]

When you want to share a youtube video but have it start for everyone already where it needs to be, start the video, and get it to the time you want. Then right click on video and click on "Copy URL at current time" and when people watch it, it will start at that time.

[stgatilov]

On 2/2/2023 at 2:33 AM, jaxa said:

The Dark Mod running on an Elbrus-8SV with a Radeon RX 580

That's probably because TDM was/is built natively for Elbrus, while the commerical games are translated from x86 code on-the-fly.
We did some work for that to happen together with @r.a.sattarov a few years ago.

[Oktokolo]

1.5 GHz just isn't enough to get any good single-thread performance and games still need that even when they sortof are multithreaded today.
But still kudos to them building their own CPU and it probably more than good enough for powering the offices needed to keep critical infrastructure working.

Thanks for sharing.

[nbohr1more]

I’ll bet it performs way better than stated in the article. When I saw the YouTube video it looked like they were using capped FPS which has horrible performance on Linux and even dips below 30 fps on the training mission with capable hardware. Uncap fps on the same setup and you have over 100fps everywhere in that same mission. Window works much better in capped mode but still has issues

[JackFarmer]

 

[nbohr1more]

A few new articles popped up:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/03/thief-like-free-and-open-source-game-the-dark-mod-2-13-brings-better-ai-vision-and-new-graphical-goodies/

https://www.pcgamesn.com/thief/the-dark-mod-update

https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/version-2-13-of-the-dark-mod-thief-game-in-the-doom-3-engine-released/

[nbohr1more]

PC Gamer came through with a big article:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/after-16-years-the-dark-mod-finally-has-guards-as-perceptive-as-in-thief-the-days-of-seeing-knocked-out-ai-in-the-middle-of-a-bright-spotlight-get-ignored-are-over/

[AluminumHaste]

That link doesn't work for me, PCGamer says article not found.

This works????

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/after-16-years-the-dark-mod-finally-has-guards-as-perceptive-as-in-thief-the-days-of-seeing-knocked-out-ai-in-the-middle-of-a-bright-spotlight-get-ignored-are-over/

[lowenz]

It does