GLQuake Performance

The following tip is not directly related to the Assassin 3D but should help you get the results you want while playing GLQuake. It was an Email sent to me from a member of the Assassin 3D Quake Clan

From: Monte Fisher
Subject: Of only conceivable interest to GLQuakers...

I was confused by all of the different suggestions and FAQ's about GLQuake. Inspired by this review of the Pure3D http://www.frag.com/reviews/r-9/, I downloaded the "bigass1" demo http://www.frag.com/leet/bigass1.zip, which is a very intense **multiplayer** demo and therefore gives a better assessment of multiplayer performance, to experiment with the various settings. (Downside: the bigass1 demo take 4-6 minutes to run….) I guess the part of me that used to be a scientist (I have a PhD in chemistry, but then I went to law school) is not completely dead....

Note that I have a 266 P2, 64 MB EDO RAM, Matrox Millenium II w/8 MB WRAM, and of course now the Pure3D. Obviously I have no idea how any of this would translate -- I emphatically have no idea how this stuff works -- but I presume the effects would be similar and proportional. (In the review I mentioned above, he had just obtained a 300 P2 w/128 MB SDRAM, and he got 45 fps at 512x384 with all the options on...!)

Anyway, I started with the following in my autoexec.cfg:

gl_playermip "0"
gl_flashblend 0
r_mirroralpha 0.3
gl_polyblend 1
r_shadows 1
r_wateralpha 0.1

And played with various command-line changes:

-width 512 -height 384 -bpp 32 -window -zone 512 -heapsize 32000: = 33.0 fps
-width 640 -height 480 -bpp 32 -window -zone 512 -heapsize 32000: = 23.7 fps
-width 640 -height 480 -bpp 16 -window -zone 512 -heapsize 32000: = 23.9 fps
-width 640 -height 480 -bpp 32 -window -zone 512 : = 23.9 fps
-width 640 -height 480 -bpp 32 -window : = 23.9 fps
-width 640 -height 480 -window : = 23.9 fps
-width 640 -height 480 : = 23.9

I suppose zone 512 does nothing for me because my autoexec.cfg is not overly huge. The only thing that really has an effect is screensize. (Used to be, when I ran 512x384, it was squished and a little off to the right –- V’alien reported the same thing. His reported fix did nothing for me -- but then at some point it stopped having that problem, and I have no idea why –- nothing I've played with makes it recur....)

Then I tried the GLQ+ "maximum FPS" setup, which is:

r_shadows 1
r_wateralpha 0.7
r_mirroralpha 0.3
r_drawviewmodel 1
m_filter 0
gl_picmip 0
gl_playermip 1
gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST
gl_flashblend 1
gl_polyblend 0
gl_ztrick 1
gl_keeptjunctions 0

And got: -width 512 -height 384: = 38.5 fps
-width 640 -height 480: = 25.9 fps

I really like being able to look down into, and up out of, water, so I changed:

r_wateralpha 0.15

And got: -width 512 -height 384: = 38.0 fps

Turning on the silly mirror effect (r_mirroralpha 0.1) made no difference, so I kept that too.

Turning off playermip, so in multipatch all of the other players are in sharp focus, knocked me down another half-fps, to 37.5, which I figured I can live with.

Then I played with texturemode, which adjusts how GLQuakey the graphics are, that is they range from "nearest," which looks very much like plain old’ Quake to "linear_mipmap_linear," which looks the best, here’s what I got:

GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_NEAREST = 37.5 fps
GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST
GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_LINEAR
GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST (Default) = 37.5 fps
GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR = 37.4 fps

One more thing. Changing gl_flashblend to 0, so you get "dynamic lighting" effects, drops that down to 33.4 – but it’s such a very cool effect (get in a big dark place, like e1m8, and watch what happens as your rockets pass
through dark places – woah!) I’m going to try sticking with it….

I think I’m now DONE with this, unless anyone has further insights.

So, my autoexec.cfg now contains:

gl_playermip 0 // in multiplayer, others' skins are sharp -- 1 or 2 blur them slightly
r_shadows 1 // see shadows!
r_wateralpha 0.15 // so can see clearly down into, or up out of, water
r_mirroralpha 0.1 // silly: stained glass windows are mirrors
gl_picmip 0 // 1 and 2 increasingly blur the textures (and mess up other things...)
gl_flashblend 0 // 0 for dynamic light (slower); 1 for the sunglare effect (faster)
gl_polyblend 0 // 1 is like normal Quake; 0 causes better visibility when under water, quaded, etc.
gl_ztrick 1 // 0 prevents "clearing the zbuffer every frame", for a very slight speedup
gl_keeptjunctions 0 // 0 "removes colinear vertexes" -- a bit faster, a few stray pixels...
m_filter 0 // ?? (these were adapted from GLQ+'s max-fps set -- I can't find documentation for this one
r_drawviewmodel 1 // ?? (ditto)
//these are in order from least good to best graphic quality -- choose 1:
//GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_NEAREST
//GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST
//GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_LINEAR
//GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST (Default)
GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR

No_One_You_Know[A3D]

Thanks Monte ! If you have any comments and or suggestions for Monte send him an email.

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This page was last updated 06/13/04