Quake running at 1 frame/sec

[Jethryn Freyman]

OK, not original Quake, but TenebraeQuake and DarkPlaces with high-res models plus enhanced lighting.

It's just stupid, though. They may have upgraded lighting, better textures... but they pale in comparison to Quake 4 or Doom 3 - yet every tie there's a scene with a lot of flares or coronas/fancy lighting, the FPS drops to the single digits.

Why?

I blame poor/quick coding. Clearly they aren't remotely optimised for PPC Macs. Compare that to CorePlayer, which plays 6mbit+ 1080 H264 video files fine. Yet it slows to LESS THAN 1 frame/sec in any lighting-intense enhanced-Quake scenes, and then two seconds later jumps back to 250 frames/sec when there aren't fancy explosions/lighting effects being rendered. Yet my GPU can certainly handle that and far beyond without breaking a sweat, therefore I must blame quick and cheap coding.

Yeah, I get that the PPC is a "dead" platform, but really, whatever happened to programmers taking pride in their work? Hell, CorePayer hasn't been updated in half a decade, yet is probably the most technically refined, efficient, and bang-for-buck piece of code I've ever used. Seriously. It uses half the CPU power of VLC - and then performs BETTER.

<3 the G5.

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Also - my system is far from low end - maxed out RAM, dual 1.8 G5 CPUs, and an ATI Fire GL X3 that currently scores higher in OpenMark than any other PPC Mac on Macrumors 🙂

 

[thorns]

What are you trying to say?

 

[NutsNGum]

I'd blame the fact that you're trying to game on a machine that's wildly past its sell-by date.

 

[Hrududu]

OK, not original Quake, but TenebraeQuake and DarkPlaces with high-res models plus enhanced lighting.

It's just stupid, though. They may have upgraded lighting, better textures... but they pale in comparison to Quake 4 or Doom 3 - yet every tie there's a scene with a lot of flares or coronas/fancy lighting, the FPS drops to the single digits.

Why?

I blame poor/quick coding. Clearly they aren't remotely optimised for PPC Macs. Compare that to CorePlayer, which plays 6mbit+ 1080 H264 video files fine. Yet it slows to LESS THAN 1 frame/sec in any lighting-intense enhanced-Quake scenes, and then two seconds later jumps back to 250 frames/sec when there aren't fancy explosions/lighting effects being rendered. Yet my GPU can certainly handle that and far beyond without breaking a sweat, therefore I must blame quick and cheap coding.

Yeah, I get that the PPC is a "dead" platform, but really, whatever happened to programmers taking pride in their work? Hell, CorePayer hasn't been updated in half a decade, yet is probably the most technically refined, efficient, and bang-for-buck piece of code I've ever used. Seriously. It uses half the CPU power of VLC - and then performs BETTER.

<3 the G5.

----------

Also - my system is far from low end - maxed out RAM, dual 1.8 G5 CPUs, and an ATI Fire GL X3 that currently scores higher in OpenMark than any other PPC Mac on Macrumors 🙂

Sorry, but dual 1.8 is low end. And the ATI Fire is not a gaming card by any means. Its not secret the Fire is a workstation card much like the Quadro series from nVidia. I don't disagree that poor coding has a lot to do with poor performance, but you can't expect too much in gaming performance from the setup you've got.