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Here are some preliminary results from the Classic build of the Q3A point release 1.29f. The machine used is a Beige G3 Desktop with an OEM ZIF at 466Mhz with a 1Mb cache, 256Mb RAM, MacOS 9.1, OpenGL 1.2.1 and VM on. Graphics card is a Voodoo 5 PCI with version 1.1.3b drivers and 1.3.6 ROM. All tests were performed with a clean cfg file and a minimal extension set and sound quality was set to low. Unfortunately this point release uses yet another demo file, so comparisons with previous results are difficult to make. My setup is hardly top of the range, but is similar to that of many Mac gamers, so hopefully these results will be of interest. To start with I used the default settings - 'Normal'
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2xFSAA |
Dual Chip |
| 640x480 |
27.5fps |
31.2fps |
| 800x600 |
27.4fps |
30fps |
| 1024x768 |
22.3fps |
29.8fps |
Next I turned off all of the game options from the menu, that is; Ejecting Brass, Dynamic Lights, Identify Target and High Quality Sky.
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2xFSAA |
Dual Chip |
| 640x480 |
33.3fps |
36.6fps |
| 800x600 |
27.4fps |
36.5fps |
| 1024x768 |
24.1fps |
35.9fps |
Now to get those graphics settings up, 32-bit colour and 32-bit Max. Quality textures with Tri-linear filtering.
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2xFSAA |
Dual Chip |
| 640x480 |
30.7fps |
34.6fps |
| 800x600 |
27fps |
33.4fps |
| 1024x768 |
17.7fps |
31.5fps |
As you can see, frame-rate really starts to drop of at higher resolutions with 2xFSAA as has been seen before with test of the V5, this is not at all surprising. With these high quality settings, an occasional slowdown became apparent at times of intense action, this can easily be resolved by moving the texture detail down one notch. Although these results were very pleasing and the game played better than it ever has on my machine and was extremely stable and smooth, I wanted to see how much the sound was holding back framerates by taking valuable CPU cycles. I also noticed that I'd made a fatal mistake during my late-night testing, I'd left the music on (allthough it wasn't playing as I have all the files on my hd) causing another performance hit. Rather than turning sound off completely I set s_mixahead to 0.11, below it's default value of 0.2 but not too low to cause the sound to stutter, turned the music off and turned simple items on. Here are the final numbers with all other settings the same as my 2nd batch of tests.
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2xFSAA |
Dual Chip |
| 640x480 |
39fps |
40.5fps |
| 800x600 |
35.1fps |
39.3fps |
| 1024x768 |
24.6fps |
38.8fps |
So there you go, I'm sure many people's own experiences will vary, but this should have given you a rough idea of how the Point Release performs. Great thanks to Graeme for getting this out of the door. I'm sure it will be interesting to see how performance fairs on some of the newer machines, but I for one am very happy with this point release.
-Ben
Quake3 1.29 Classic Beta Availability: The 25MB download is available at:
I welcome reader reports on this beta update.
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