[sldev] An experiment in paleocomputing

[Harold Brown]

Let's see.

Quake Minimum System Requirements:

Intel Pentium(R) 75 MHz processor or better
Memory: DOS -- 8 MB RAM required (16 MB recommended)
              Win 95 -- 16 MB RAM required (24 recommended)
--------------------------------------

You were running the game on a system that was twice the speed, and had 4 to
8 times the amount of memory the game called for.... If you had used GLQuake
you probably would have gotten even higher framerates.

-------------------------------------

But as Dzonatas said, the Quake Engine has no relation to the SecondLife
engine in any way.

You're talking about an engine that was designed for fast interior
rendering.  The maps were pre-culled to eliminate polys that would never be
rendered, lighting was pre-generated and the maps them selves were broken
apart into sub-sections to keep only a small number of polys in view.

The closest engine to what SL has would have been Tribes (Torque), and even
then they had two seperate rendering engines, a Quake like system for
interiors and a seperate renderer for exterior scenes.

Even then these engines relied on the fact that everything they will display
was on your HD and had been pre-optimized for 3d Rendering.

On 7/4/07, Alan Grimes <agrimes at speakeasy.net> wrote:
>
> I fired up my 150 mhz Pentium MMX; 64mb ram a few minutes ago.
>
> I ran quake, and was treated to a very responsive 20 fps... (more or
> less), at 640x480.
>
> This machine from the mid '90s was playing Quake 1 with nothing but a
> linear framebuffer for graphics and beating the living $#!7 out of my
> dual athlon 1.2ghz/linux on Second life... Granted linux extracts a
> fairly hefty performance penalty for 3D apps but the degree of slowdown
> I've been seeing is outrageous. The bus on this machine is 5x faster
> than the Pentium 150, it has a video card that's faster than the sum
> total of every transistor in the elder machine,
>
> What gives?
>
> --
> Opera: Sing it loud! :o(  )>-<
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