Quake III Arena - 1997 vs 1998 vs 1999 PC
Posted by ColdCrab6928@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 19 comments
Posted by ColdCrab6928@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 19 comments
noob-combo@reddit
Absolutely bonkers engine, hit ran so smooth even on a potato.
And those smooth rounded walls etc.
Chef's kiss.
ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)
Did you play Quake III on a machine similar to my 1998 one? If so, did you customize the graphics preset to make it run smoother? Personally I found performance to be barely tolerable on the 1998 machine.
chandleya@reddit
Yeah, we all did lol. Q3 was the benchmark of whether you had a proper GPU or not. First mass market shooter like that that absolutely had to have OpenGL.
Which meant there were shitttttt drivers from chip makers that had no business running OpenGL. SIS6326? ATI Rage Pro? Intel I740?
So many bad options! You could run the 6326 with a Pentium 4 2.4ghz and you'd still enjoy 8 fps. Similar with the Rage Pro, it had no business being called 3D graphics.
nismotigerwvu@reddit
The funny thing about the Rage Pro, is that while your description is the experience the overwhelming majority of users had, late drivers and switching to vertex lighting could get you 30fps at 640x480. The hardware was an odd duck for certain, but once the fires were put out by the driver team, it was really quite capable.
VirginiaIsFoLovers@reddit
Living with a Rage Pro and wanting to game was nothing but pain! I was unsuccessful at the time in persuading my father to go for the Riva TNT when we speced out a machine in 1998.
We had a very nice Micron P150, but it was already beginning to reach its limits, especially w/o MMX or support for later Pentiums. It is crazy how fast things were advancing at that time, especially in retrospect.
But it's true the early ATI Rage Pro drivers were pretty bad, so I'm curious to check the late optimizations out... if I can ever locate where that card is hiding 😅
nismotigerwvu@reddit
Oh yeah. I was lucky enough to get a Voodoo II to pair with mine back then. It was pretty overkill for my 233 MHz K6 but the triangle setup engine helped. The Rage Pro was an excellent 2D and multimedia card and tinkering with it was more out of curiosity than necessity. No one would have believed you back then, but with mature drivers the rage pro ended up outperforming the Voodoo 1 by around 10 to 15 percent. Granted no Voodoo owner would have ever felt buyers remorse over this.
chandleya@reddit
My poor buddy back then was rolling a P233MMX with a Banshee trying to play HL, CS, Q2, Q3 with the rest of us lol. Really reminded me of his crappy rig!
I wish he was still with us to aggravate about that shit. KIA 2004.
MrDephcon@reddit
Bro when I started playing cs beta 5, pretty sure I was running a pentium 120 with a voodoo2. 7-14fps, and I was using a trackman marble plus.
I’ve never grovelled so hard for anything from my parents in my life
chandleya@reddit
That’s a whole lot of GPU for a socket 5!
to3cutter@reddit
Voodoo 1 = Pentium 1 = Quake 1 Voodoo 2 = Pentiu 2 = Quake 2 Voodoo 3 = Pentium 3 = Quake 3
Simple math 🤷♂️
chandleya@reddit
Damn Voodoo 1 on a Pentium with Q1 was probably a real nice setup.
ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)
Yes, it's amazing.
to3cutter@reddit
On a 14" Phillips CRT monitor! 😒
ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)
I can get behind that!
eulynn34@reddit
The pace of advancing tech and PC performance in this time period was really crazy, you had to be building a new system, every 6 months if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge
DumbNTough@reddit
I remember the good old days when I didn't even know what Frames Per Second were and my standard for performance was "My dad's computer run it without turning itself off for safety."
ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)
I had no concept of frames per second as late as 2009. Specifically I remember playing Bioshock on my GeForce 9800 GTX and it was too choppy unless I lowered the resolution to 800 x 600. This compromised the image quality, and I didn't like that, but I disliked the choppy performance even more, so I just accepted it.
DumbNTough@reddit
I dipped out of PC gaming completely around 2006 or so on some nondescript Dell tower that served as the family computer.
Made my triumphant return a couple decades later with a grownup job and a home build i9-14900K / RTX 4090 build 🏋️♂️
ColdCrab6928@reddit (OP)
I've ducked in and out of PC gaming over the decades, too. In the 90s my Dad let me play DOS games on his Cyrix 586 system. Then I was a console gamer until 2009 - 2013 when I got that 9800 GTX system mentioned earlier. Then around 2019 I got back into PC gaming again after getting propagandized by Linus Tech Tips and Digital Foundry.