Quake III on MorphOS (details turned up = slow down)

[Matt_H]

Please tell me that's a real mod and not just a 'shopped image. I want to play it

Quack represents the finest in first-person feed-'em-up gaming on the market today.
- Over 10 kinds of bread
- Battery-powered breadgrinder for rapid-fire crumb-making action
- 30 different waterfowl with advanced AI nibbling that adapts to your play technique
- Ultra-realistic water-splashing engine
- Treacherous footing around ponds challenges even the most experienced gamers to keep from falling in

[Golem!dk]

I'm running Quake III on an eMac under MorphOS, but when I turn all the details on, it slows down horribly.

Why would this be? I thought this game was old and could run without any issues on hardware that came out around the eMac era...
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System requirements:
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And those system requirements should be ok for the lowest resolution with details turned down, of course there is still room for improvement in the MorphOS drivers, but a radeon 9200 with a 64bit bus is certainly not a speed demon.

[Fab]

What resolution do you use exactly?

I can play Quake3 at 1024x768@32bits at high quality preset without any problem on my Mac mini with 32MB vram (demo four runs between 40 and 120fps depending on places).

In background i also had 2 1280x1024@32 screens (one for ambient and one for OWB). But it doesn't matter, since the memory management is per-screen.

[EDIT] But indeed, with texture details at max, it consumes quite more video ram, and it's too much.

[Iggy]

I'm surprised that a Mac Mini with only 32MB of video RAM does that well.
From the beginning of this thread, my first thoughts were "yes, if video games were a major concern, you should have waited for Powermac support".

[Karlos]

What resolution do you use exactly?

I can play Quake3 at 1024x768@32bits at high quality preset without any problem on my Mac mini with 32MB vram (demo four runs between 40 and 120fps depending on places).

In background i also had 2 1280x1024@32 screens (one for ambient and one for OWB). But it doesn't matter, since the memory management is per-screen.

[EDIT] But indeed, with texture details at max, it consumes quite more video ram, and it's too much.

Call that 10MB for your 2 background screens, leaving you with 22MB, assuming they weren't paged out. You then have 3MB per frame buffer for the game, so if you are using double buffering, that's 6MB. You probably have a 32-bit combined stencil/z-buffer (8-bit/24-bit), so there's another 3MB, although you might have a 16-bit Z-buffer only. We are down to 13MB of video memory free for textures, less if we assume that there are other allocations going on.

As you can see, it all adds up. The moment you go for the highest texture detail, you are probably getting to the point where stuff starts having to be switched in and out of VRAM. Not sure how MOS implementation of CGX does this, but I suspect it's not as quick as it could be.

[Fab]

As you can see, it all adds up. The moment you go for the highest texture detail, you are probably getting to the point where stuff starts having to be switched in and out of VRAM. Not sure how MOS implementation of CGX does this, but I suspect it's not as quick as it could be.

As i said, it's on a per-screen basis (it gets swapped to system ram if needed at screen change). So your calculation about background is quite irrelevant.

[Lando]

I'm running Quake III on an eMac under MorphOS, but when I turn all the details on, it slows down horribly.

Why would this be? I thought this game was old and could run without any issues on hardware that came out around the eMac era...
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System requirements:

3D graphics accelerator with full OpenGL support, Pentium II 233 MHz or AMD 350 MHz K6-2 processor or Athlon processor, 64 MB RAM, 8 MB video card, 500 MB of free hard drive space, 100% DirectX 3.0 or higher compatible sound card, CD-ROM drive (600 kB/s sustained transfer rate)

I'm pretty sure I more than have that covered right?

For comparison purposes, on a PC Athlon XP 2500 with a 128MB Radeon 9200 Quake 3 running Windows XP gives 27-28FPS at 1280x1024 with everything turned on high, and a Dual G4 PowerMac running OS X with the same graphics card gives 23-24 fps.

So the lesser 32MB Radeon 9200 in the eMac is obviously going to do worse.

The eMac was never a gaming computer, even when Quake III first came out.  It's nothing to do with MorphOS (in fact MorphOS is significantly faster than OS X).

[fishy_fiz]

For comparison purposes, on a PC Athlon XP 2500 with a 128MB Radeon 9200 Quake 3 running Windows XP gives 27-28FPS at 1280x1024 with everything turned on high, and a Dual G4 PowerMac running OS X with the same graphics card gives 23-24 fps.

No idea where you got those figures. I quick glance around the net suggests it's more in the realm of 80-100 fps on an athlonxp 2500+ with a radeon9200 using 1280x1024. It's only when you beef up both fsaa and antriscopic filtering to at least 4x that the frame rate reduces to those sort of rates, but then its not an apples for apples comparison. I guess the type of radeon 9200 in use is a big influence too. The 64bit memory bus on the se editions are quite crippling.