***GLQuake!
by David Lohse

Finally, the first accelerated version of Quake has hit the streets
(sort of). A preliminary version of GLQuake, an OpenGL version of the
hit 3D game designed specifically on 3Dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset, is
now available for download from id's ftp site. The file available for
download is actually only an OpenGL patch for Quake; in order to use
it, you must already have Quake installed on your system (shareware or
retail version).

Although designed on 3Dfx's chipset, GLQuake also runs on other
vendors' platforms. According to the readme file that comes with the
binary:

Intergraph: Reactor does not support OpenGL at this time;
Intense-3D can run glquake, but only at about 8-10 fps
due to limited (15 mpix) fill rate;
It runs pretty good on realizm boards, except when a
lot of lights are flickering
3D Labs: Does not run or runs poorly on 3D Labs GLINT and
Permedia-based boards; however, 3D Labs has informed
WAVE that they are currently working on drivers to
fully support GLQuake
DEC: Powerstorm works similarly to Intergraph boards, but
does not support texture object extensions
Dynamic Pictures: Do not work at all; according to id, "They have
VERY slow texturing rates, and don't support texture
binding."

GLQuake also supports various runtime options that are specified via
the command line. In addition to allowing the user to run Quake in a
window of specified size (640x480 to 1280x1024) instead of full-screen,
several OpenGL options may be toggled by the user, including the
texturing mode (point sampled, bilinear or trilinear), a trick to split
the Z-buffer, and the ability to add colored blend affects to dynamic
light flashes.

WAVE tested GLQuake on several 3Dfx boards, and other than slightly
quirky behavior and a few crashes, it ran beautifully. The texturing
was nearly flawless and the motion smooth at 20+ fps, resulting in an
almost lifelike environment; compared to the unaccelerated version,
GLQuake is vastly more impressive.

Using Quake's built-in benchmarking capabilities (accessed from the
command line via the "timedemo" command), WAVE ran all three of the
provided test scenes on three of 3Dfx's boards. The results are as
follows; the results are in frames/sec for each of the three test
scenes provided by id:

System specs: 166 MHz Pentium, AMI Atlas PCI-II motherboard,
64 MB RAM, ATI Mach64 VGA accelerator

Hardware Demo1 Demo2 Demo3 Average

Unaccelerated 10.6 11.4 8.9 10.3
Obsidian 50-2440 23.5 22.1 22.7 22.8
Obsidian 50-4220 23.4 19.8 21.4 21.5
Obsidian 100-4440 28.5 25.5 25.5 26.5

GLQuake can be obtained via anonymous ftp at:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/unsup/


Wave Issue 9702 2/3/97 Article 5-01