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Posted: 7/07/99 |
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Well I hope that everyone had a great 4th of July weekend. At least I hope you didn’t sit at home all weekend fragging away on your new copy of Quake 2 and got to see some real fireworks. Wow! It is so nice to have the copy of Quake 2 to try out so I put it through some tests this weekend. First of all, I have to say that I agree with Ruffin’s observations that if you only have the minimum system requirements, don’t even try. I have run it on two machines so far, and they are:
And there are slowdowns on both of those machines in scenes with a lot of action. My first observation, as it seems was everyone’s, was that Quake 2 is very dark onscreen. I saw this with both the Page Pro and the Voodoo 2 cards. For Rage Pro, I only needed to change the Gamma from within the video controls of the game, but for Voodoo 2 I modified the Mesa prefs with SimpleText as detailed in the Game News. Note that the b4 release of the Mesa3DfxEngine does allow for gamma settings up to 4, therefor there is no need to edit this with SimpleText anymore. I found that a setting of 2.5 to be very good for the game. I have also experimented with the Voodoo2.ini files and seemed to have good results. I could overclock my Voodoo 2 card to 100Mhz, but it crashed on launching Quake for anything higher than that. Upon running timedemos on the Voodoo 2 card, what I found was essentially no difference between the clock speed setting for the Voodoo2 card and the FPS that was measured. But without the Voodoo2.ini file present there was about a 15% drop in frame rate over the previous settings (see table for actual numbers). If you have a Voodoo 2 then you should use the Voodoo2.ini file. The Mac with the Rage Pro did not fare as well on testing. The Rage Pro is the absolute minimum that you should use to try this game. I think that I have seen better results with Rage Pro on the Quake 3 Test than on Quake 2. If your Mac is rage Pro equipped, I would not recommend going higher than 640x480 resolution for game play and you should probably set the texture detail down a notch. With detail on max and 640x480 as the resolution, I got 19.7 fps for Demo1 and 19.3 fps for Demo2. That is the bare minimum for good gameplay. If you turn the detail down one notch, then the fps goes up to 21.6 fps better, but still not great. Drop the texture detail down one more notch and you get 21.8 fps. Which is really nothing considering the game doesn’t look very good at this level of detail (an understatement actually). This Mac also has a Voodoo 1 card in it, and I managed to do a little testing with that card doing the 3D work. At the same level of detail, Voodoo 1 is able to get 3 fps boost over the built in Rage Pro. I even gave the Voodoo2.ini file a chance and it didn’t make a difference. Considering what Mike has shown for fps on a Rage 128 equipped Mac, I think that the only real choice for gaming is a Voodoo 2 or the Rage 128.
Overall, I think that this will be a great game to play and it has enough difficulty to keep people entertained for a while, at least until Quake 3 gets here. As yet, I have not had the time or opportunity to play online (I plan to get some online hours tonight), but I am hosting a game at my office a little later in the week (Wednesday I think) and I should be able to give the LAN based networking code a bit of a test. More on my impressions of Quake 2 later on.
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