Release Why Quake 3?

[Welsh Jester]

Why is quake 3 being advertised (seems like alot) on a system that has a 600mhz processor?

See, i dont understand this because.. on my very first computer back in 98-99 i had only a 366mhz celeron cpu and that could run quake 3 very fast, over 60fps nearly all the time.

So how come pandora cant run Quake 3 at a constant 60-> fps?.. the game should be a cakewalk to it

 

[Zarneth]

Because it's the best well known and popular game we know has an incredibly high chance of being ported to the pandora.

Also 600mhz x86 does not equal 600mhz ARM cpu, designed to be cool compact and portable, not pump out raw performance. You can't really even compare x86 cpu's anymore either. I've had new and older cpu's, same brand, same mhz, yet one benchmarked almost twice that of the other.
Anyway. 3d hardware will make a LOT more difference to games than cpu.

So how come pandora cant run Quake 3 at a constant 60-> fps?.. the game should be a cakewalk to it

I don't recall seeing it being ported yet. Anyway. Pandora isn't even out yet. You can hardly expect it to be fully ported and optimised. They have to sort out the base operating system first.

 

[Welsh Jester]

I understand 3D hardware will make a bigger difference, but even on my first celeron computer i only had a 16mb ati rage card or something built in im sure quake 3 ran fast on that, or am i getting confused with a computer i built later on hmm i cant fully remember.

but the graphics in the pandora should be way better

its a shame its not possible to have more than one CPU in the handheld and have a program to make everything multithreaded that you run, that is more like a dream that cant happen though. or a very difficult one at that.

 

[Spirit]

[...] or am i getting confused with a computer i built later on hmm i cant fully remember.

You are.

 

[alfaalex101]

Because,

It hasn't been done on a DS and it hasn't been done on a PSP. Now, we can have it run amazingly on the Pandora.

Oh, did we mention you can add a mouse?

OWNED. I can't wait to be playing Quake 3 on my Pandora.

 

[Sphinxter]

Quake III rules.

 

[n0ahg]

Why is quake 3 being advertised (seems like alot) on a system that has a 600mhz processor?

See, i dont understand this because.. on my very first computer back in 98-99 i had only a 366mhz celeron cpu and that could run quake 3 very fast, over 60fps nearly all the time.

So how come pandora cant run Quake 3 at a constant 60-> fps?.. the game should be a cakewalk to it

Did this machine from 98-99 fit in your pocket? ;-)

 

[JayFoxRox]

Quake 3 was not meant to be run on a portable plattform and needs changes to some code because the Pandora doesn't provide the graphics API which you would expect on a PC for example. Quake 3 was written years ago when you had an abstract API. The Pandora gives more freedom to developers who have to re-implement what a normal Desktop PC did feature by default some years ago (they are also more complex now and moved away from abstract APIs to feature blown middleware). The bandwidth between the chips is usually limited more too and is probably one of the bottlenecks of the Pandora.

See, the Pandora is advertised with the Amiga emulator - now what?!? Thats "freaking old" you might say. Its still power hungry and hard to do - not possible on a portable platform like this.

(Correct me if I m wrong though, never had a real look at Quake source and how low-level it really is, not sure about the bandwidth thing though but it was mentioned a few times and I had no way (nor time) of measuring that yet..)

 

[ldesnogu]

I'm not sure I understand you. Q3 uses OpenGL and that certainly is still being used massively, though it has evolved into something more shader oriented.

 

[JayFoxRox]

Years back we used OpenGL differently to get higher speeds. Buffers became more important over the time, most effects are done through specific hardware features and shaders now while they were done using multiple texturestages and "exploits" back in the days.
Today, you can also do a lot of the calculations on the GPU and most compilers seem to have improved at vector extension support for example.
I'm not too deep into this kind of stuff like optimizing something etc. but I know some other people who had to rewrite their demos for newer hardware - and thats only been only the last 5 years. Quake 3 is 10 years old - I'm sure that a lot of things changed since then.
But yeh, my arguments are still kinda loose - I better stfu at times

 

[Megatog615]

A lot of the effects in Q3 are actually done on the CPU in software, rather than straight OpenGL code. The reason behind this was that Carmack was afraid the various graphics card companies would never agree on a standard way of implementing OpenGL in their drivers. Features like Environment mapping(tcGen environment) and the vertex alpha specularity(alphaGen lightingSpecular) were done on the CPU.

Because a lot of the renderer is CPU-based, it is also CPU-bound(mostly due to the use of Vertex Arrays instead of VBOs), capping out at about 25,000 rendered polys before it drops FPS considerably. Normally this doesn't occur mid-game but several mods pushed the engine to the limit(and beyond). This is even more of an issue with the Pandora because it doesn't have the generous CPU muscle to reach the bottleneck.

Q3 needs to support VBOs. With VBO optimization we could see over twice the performance out of the Q3 engine on the Pandora. With VBOs, the (currently unreachable)bottleneck is removed, and performance is massively increased at the same time.

Q3 also fakes dynamic lighting with multiplicative lightmaps(which don't illuminate dark rooms) generated at the point of the dynamic light source(gun firing, rocket light, etc). This could be replaced with OpenGL GL_LIGHTING. The lightgrid could also use GL_LIGHTING to light the world(with lightmaps disabled) and player models.

 

[Meigus]

Q3 also fakes dynamic lighting with multiplicative lightmaps(which don't illuminate dark rooms) generated at the point of the dynamic light source(gun firing, rocket light, etc). This could be replaced with OpenGL GL_LIGHTING. The lightgrid could also use GL_LIGHTING to light the world(with lightmaps disabled) and player models.

I sure hope so. The lighting was one of the main things that made the quake engine games so unappealing to me.

 

[Burgsie]

Quake rules thats why quake is super fun and BOOM HEAD SHOTS!!!

Thats why Quake is used.