Quake!

Redone 6/22/99

© 1999 Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS
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Email Rob Art at barefoot@hawaii.rr.com

"Quake," is a fun "first person shoot everything that moves" game. It exercises every "muscle" in your Mac. It takes advantage of whatever hardware acceleration you have.

The "frames per second" ratings were obtained by starting up the game, pressing the "~" key, then entering "TIMEDEMO DEMO1" followed by RETURN and another "~" once the demo started. The average frame rate is displayed at the bottom of the screen at the end of the demo. Monitor and Game Resolution was set to 640 x 480. Other options were set to Flames ON, Filtering ON, Shadows ON, Skip Lines OFF, Double Pixels OFF.

Some Thoughts

1. Don't be too depressed if you don't have a Mac that will run at 40+ frames per second. Your naked eye ceases to distinguish a break in movement at any speed above 16 frames per second. I call that the "Jerky Threshold" (see chart).

2. It may surprise you to hear me say, "Speed isn't everything," but I was very impressed with the visual quality of Quake when using the Voodoo boards. If you are a Quake aficionado, you'll wish you had one of these boards or something similar.

3. Now for the bad news. Techworks no longer makes the Power3D Voodoo1 for the Mac and MicroConversions, the maker of the Game Wizard Voodoo2, has closed their doors. Now it becomes a game of buying a PC Voodoo board (like the Diamond Monster3d) and trying to use existing Mac drivers from TechWorks or MicroConversions.

4. The RAGE 128 blows the Voodoo2 away on Quake. I hear from my PC buddies that the Voodoo3 catches up again. Now if I could just find Mac drivers for a Voodoo3...

 

 

Consult Absolute Mac, Deal Mac and my Hot Deals page for best prices on speed upgrades.

 

RETURN to bare feats SPEED test index

© 1998, 1999 Rob Art Morgan, editor of BARE FEATS
Gotta Question? Comment? Want to advertise?
Email Rob Art at barefoot@hawaii.rr.com