[quake3-bugzilla] [Bug 6006] OpenGL2: Gaining up to 100 fps or more by only renaming ioquake.x86.exe to quake3.exe

[bugzilla-daemon at icculus.org]

https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6006

Monk <monk at rq3.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |monk at rq3.com

--- Comment #1 from Monk <monk at rq3.com> ---
Ok, you are aware that renaming the .exe makes a fps difference. But do you
know why?  It's because drivers are specifically tuned to that game. It was a
big controversy 10 years ago with the whole quake/quack things. Drivers were
taking quality shortcuts to get artificially inflated fps scores. Things like
forcing trilinear filtering off even when you enable it and reducing texture
quality behind the scenes, again something the user has no control over. 

So there are quality shortcuts hard coded into drivers left over from 10 years
ago. If you really care about this issue you need to approach AMD and nvidia
about enabling their "optimizations" for a binary loaded into memory called
ioquake*. You will also want to get them to disclose exactly what is going on
so we know what the trade offs will be if this is force enabled and ioquake3
has no control over the quality settings anymore. 

Now maybe they are just really optimized and there are no shortcuts being taken
anymore. I am dubious, though. 

Another thing you will want to test is scaling. Yes, the old renderer is
faster, but it does less. And the most important part is what fps does it get
at high rspeeds?  The old renderer does 1000 fps until you get rspeeds above
about 40,000 when it tanks sharply. The new renderer, I believe we are making
maps with rspeeds up to 500,000 and keeping playable fps with extra visual
goodies enabled.  Testing with a vast majority of q3 maps (max rspeeds probably
around 30,000) won't show this advantage but it allows mappers/modelers to use
more modern assets and improve both level geometry and complexity as well as
overall visual appeal since the triangle count can be much higher with playable
fps. 

Have you renamed ioquake3 to quake3 and tested to see if the new renderer gets
higher fps?  I see mainly comparisons to the old one with higher fps and the
new ones unaltered. If you have done the renaming test on the new renderer, did
it break anything or have any affect?  The new renderer uses a very different
rendering method than the original so the driver optimizations/shortcuts may
not be relevant in a modern renderer or game. Quake 3 was relatively simple. It
may not be possible to see those gains in modern times even with driver
cheating.

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