GLQuake BIGASS1 Benchmark
Some of you may wonder what this nasty word 'bigass1' is about, but unfortunately this is the official name of a special downloadable .dem file for Quake. The special thing about this demo is that it runs much longer than the well known 'demo1-3', which are implemented into Quake and it is much more complex. The bigass1 demo shows a deathmatch between about 16 players and it gets the last out of your Quake configuration. The big advantage of this demo over the demo1-3 ones is that it's MUCH more realistic. The frame rate it returns as result is much closer to your realworld Quake performance, especially when you're playing on the net. Now before you look at the results please make yourself aware that demo1-3 does NOT show the real truth. Run bigass1 on your own Quake configuration and don't be surprised if the frame rate makes you sad. This is the REAL Quake frame rate, it's not for fps-horney quakies, that can't play, but impose with their astronomical timedemo frame rate everywhere. This benchmark comparison will show, that the Quake performance of 3D accelerators is possibly quite different to what you've read elsewhere and even here in the previous review before.
Bigass1 is one multiplayer DM demo of many, which you can find at Scary's Quakeholio - Deathmatch Demos . It's a 1.7 MB .dem file, which you simply put into your id1 directory. To run this demo as a benchmark you just type 'timedemo bigass1' instead of the usual 'timedemo demo1-3'.
The NVidia RIVA 128 cards were ran with NVidia's Alpha 2 OpenGL driver. Of course am I hoping as well, that NVidia will eventually come up with a faster and better looking driver and the fact that it's currently not even a beta, shows that we can probably expect a lot still.
The benchmark was ran on a high end Pentium II 300 system with Abit's LX6 motherboard and also on a low end 6x86MX PR200 system with FIC PA-2012 motherboard. Both systems were equipped with 64 MB SDRAM, Quake ran without any tweaks, no autocfg file, no status bar, 640x480.
