Quake 3 Arena HUGE speed improvement

#1 Atreyu

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Posted 11 November 2001 - 11:12 AM

Well, for months I've been going on and on about how Windows XP ain't nuttin special.... but something happened to me tonight that made me reconsider...

Clutch told me one night that his Quake 3 timedemo benchmarks went out the roof once he switched to Windows XP. Being one of those people that never believes anything until he sees it, I had to test it out for myself.

In Windows 2000 I was getting 85FPS on the following setup:

Machine:

PIII 1GHZ @ 1.13GHZ
400MB PC133 RAM
ASUS CUSL2-C
NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB
Sound Blaster Live! Value

Quake 3 Setup:

1024X768
32 Bit Color
Lightmap
Geometric Deail at High
Texture Deatil at High
Texture Quality at Default
Texture Filter at Bilinear

On the exact same setup using Windows XP, I got 107FPS. I could not believe it. I went back and looked at all my settings over and over again to make sure things were "sticking". Sure enough... it was legit.

So by switching to Windows XP I got an extra 22 frames per second using the same settings in Quake 3. Unbelievable.

#2 Palos

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Posted 11 November 2001 - 02:57 PM

COuld it be the Nvidia driver versions that are "optimized" for XP and GeForce 3?

#3 clutch

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Posted 11 November 2001 - 09:22 PM

This version is optimized for XP and GF3, but he posted that he has an "NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB". I have always seen Win2K edging out Win9x in OpenGL benchmarking, so I can only assume that nVidia can take OpenGL optimizations a little further in WinXP.

#4 DosFreak

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Posted 12 November 2001 - 06:10 PM

Strange. These guys don't see your improvement: http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q4/os/index.x?pg=7

and I haven't seen it yet. I'll do some more tests when I get home.

#5 Palos

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Posted 12 November 2001 - 06:55 PM

I guess my wording is confusing: when i said XP and GF3 I was thinking of either one of them, or both together. So just by running the new Dets on XP they claim they have some performance improvements.

#6 clutch

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Posted 12 November 2001 - 07:53 PM

It would seem that way. OpenGL performance has also picked up in Solidworks 2001 as well, even though I had to run the installer in Win2K compatibility mode to get it started. So, why did it get faster? I have no idea, nor do I really care at this point. I have a friend with a Via-based motherboard that I am going to ask to benchmark. He was about 5fps slower than me, and I am interested in hearing what he gets. Maybe this jump is only noticed on certain chipsets or chipset/video card combinations. Atreyu and I have the same mobo and similar video cards (I have a GeForce Pro 64MB), so maybe that's a reason.

#7 Atreyu

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Posted 13 November 2001 - 10:50 PM

Well, whatever it was, it was surely sweet.... and a bit freaky. The screen was flashing and moving so fast that I actually couln't even follow the action!

I used the following timedemo (point release 1.30)

timedemo 1
demo four

Is this the only one? Why do they keep changing it with point releases? If there are other benchmarks I can run with quake (that don't require extra downloads)... lemme know. I wanna run some more tests..

I guess I could go search for this info as well... nah.