ragged blog

I noticed today that in the Benchmarking section of wikipedia, there is a link directly to their article about Quake from id software. Quake is one of the most fluent games ever created.

What I mean by that is the way in which Quake moves, and the relative accuracy with which it does it is quite unlike any more modern games, and especially modern FPS. Many users not familiar to Quake and often more so in those with less FPS playing experience do not notice the “drunkenness” sensation from modern game slowdown. This is caused by the games attempts at producing a more dynamic rate output, which given the lack of attention it receives from the less initiated seems to work.

For those of us who play for the speed and have the capability to aim at over 40fps this drunkenness feeling is horrible. More tuned FPS players can often describe a rough frames per second value for most FPS games given a few movements. They are able to identify ranges within about 5fps and can detect these from around 60fps to 0fps.

The nature of these inner workings results in GLQuake performing extremely well as a benchmark for many kinds of 3d hardware. It can produce a clear distinction in frame rate (via a time demo, which renders at the maximum processable frame rate) with even very subtle changes in the processing scheme or system performance options. The most modern cards are only just starting to push the 1000fps barrier. It will not be long before Quake becomes less useful as a tool for testing cards, as there is a limit to the fill rate and texel processing that we will ever need to do to represent graphics of indistinguishable quality differences from the artists target. Even then, Quake can still give some indication of the cards actual mathematical capabilities and will always show some change in result if the cycle speed of the processing units is changed.

Quake will always be number one for many things. There are many of us that will never forget what it’s like to pull high g’s on the first step forward.