The demo I have (on the 1999 CD of PC Zone magazine) is the same as the finished game. There may have been earlier builds of the demo out there but I'm not aware of them.
I only know about
this one. It gives the warning that it's still beta.
The version my CD has is a bit newer (BUILD 374/445). I haven't found that exact copy anywhere on the internet. The version patched with the official 445 patch is BUILD 375/445. I did however find at one point the version labeled with BUILD 365/435. There's also something called Earthlink on that CD, which I found is US internet provider. I thought this is the official first version.
Even on modern hardware the game runs like a slideshow when increasing draw distance to the maximum and disabling the fog. Guess they didn't know that at the time but the fog seems to have been put there to hide the distant pop-up graphics and increase the framerate. Later versions of the riot engine seem more optimised as TAG does not suffer this problem although it does suffer from distant pop-up mountains and distant objects.
Just did a bit of flying across The Islands level with God mode cheat and being bombarded by other dragons. Most of the time, the lowest frame-rate was 37, once it momentarily dropped to 30, that was probably external factor though. That's with AiO Patch, Fog Distance set to 200%, all graphical goodies except Lens Flare Effects enabled, 1920x1080 resolution and 4x MSAA anti-aliasing forced via dgVoodoo2. The latter two don't make much difference, max GPU load as reported by GPU-Z was 23%, so very low GPU utilization. Dropping resolution to 640x480 gains some extra frames mostly because of lower field of view rather than having to deal with less pixels. Maximum CPU utilization as reported by Process Hacker was approximately 31%. On my quad core, this means one core fully utilized plus a second core utilized somewhat below 50%. My CPU is AMD Phenom II X4 920 and the GPU is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.
My laptop with 1,35 GHz AMD APU with Radeon R2 (CPU + GPU combined on one device) fares much worse with frame-rate fluctuating between approximately 30 - 40 in the first cutscene with Fog Distance at 100%.
The game's in-built benchmark would be more interesting if there were more scenes eg. camera flying over the islands with fighting dragons and through Alwarren. And running the exact same scene across different computers with matching graphics settings is the best way to get accurate and comparable results.
I think the distance pop-up problem occurs due to fog failing to obscure the geometry completely, especially at certain angles, it's very obvious when looking at the sides of the screen compared to the center. The Suffering has that issue too and it goes even more overboard with hiding things in the distance, some objects just fade away as you're moving away from them. That version of the engine is even multi-threaded, but it still does less than Drakan's, except for the fancy pixel shader effects. Drakan: OOTF only handles certain aspects of multiplayer in the separate thread while The Suffering does call Direct3D functions from both threads. The latter could also be the case with the LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring, which uses modified version of the engine used for Drakan: TAG, though I can't confirm the former. In The Suffering version of the engine however, they did forget to rename the mutex object they use to prevent running multiple instances of the game, it's called FELLOWSHIP_INSTANCE_MUTEX.
Not the best engine for a flight based game but it was Surreal's first effort at making a game engine from scratch. I also suspect the average PC at release date couldn't play the game as it was originally intended anyway. I remember seeing an article early in D:TAG's development that Surreal had got OOTF (or part of it) running on a PS2 but framerate was poor hence an engine update and the switch to those awful low resolution textures so the game would fit in the PS2's limited RAM.
True. From YouTube videos, GTA: San Andreas seemed to have fared better few years later, though obviously still limited by PS2 hardware. GTA was still 2D at the time when Drakan was released.
Any idea what size textures are in Drakan: TAG? Most in Drakan: OOTF are 64x64, the ones for the moon and certain objects are larger. Drivers for Voodoo 2 card have auto-mipmapping option for DIrect3D apps, which make Drakan blurry. Saw that while playing with PCem.
As for Drakan's performance on the hardware of the time, I found
this. I'd be nice if he showed other parts of the game. He probably left Fog Distance at default. And then there's Matrox G400, the card of the time which was known for introducing Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, which might be the same thing you can enable in Riot Engine Options. If nothing else, I assume this card supported all graphics features of Drakan.
I'm also curious about the game's 3DNow! optimizations. One function in the game can use 3DNow! instructions, fully supported by older AMD CPUs. Mine is old enough to still have it, though there is no noticeable performance difference when optimizations are disabled. There might be a difference on the AMD CPU of the time.