Quake 3 on the Raspberry Pi 2

cstanton — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 08:21:12 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by cstanton on 10/8/2021 8:21:12 AM

I've been a Quake 3: Arena gamer since it was released into open beta. Many, many point releases ago. When I learned that it had been ported to ARM for the Raspberry Pi it piqued my curiosity, and I am more of a purist when it comes to frame-rate.

In the earlier days of gaming, frame rate truly mattered. These days the game tends to be locked to 30 or 60 frames per second. Quake 3: Arena, though, if you managed to hit the sweet spot of 125fps you had the gaming edge. People made jump height calculators to help. The new incarnation, Quake Live, kinda limits your frame rate as well and it is why Doom 3 limited their frame rate to 60fps (John Carmack's reasoning was probably 'why do you need more? this solves problems') but it made it less fun.

I ran Quake 3: Arena on the Raspberry Pi with the config attached to this post (as in, it's a Quake 3 config, so you put it in your baseq3 folder). So you can run it yourself with your build. I own a legitimate copy of the game, so I was able to use the original PK3 files. The time-demos were run on Class 10 Hama brand SD cards with clean installations of Raspbian from 31st of January.

www.youtube.com/watch

The demo was loaded at the same time, and easily the Raspberry Pi 2 destroys the B+ in speed of loading and frame-rate. You can recreate the demo by opening the console and typing:

timedemo 1

With seeing the current framerate by:

cg_drawfps 1

And then just choose the demo you want to play from the Demo menu. So long as you have the relevant pk3/map files.

The B+ managed 39.6fps

The Pi2 managed 163.7fps

Oh and here's some bonus footage for those who're familiar with the jump for the megahealth on Q3DM13 (if you're not sure what I'm doing, searching for it or try it on your B+ ):

www.youtube.com/watch

Attachments:

community.element14.com/.../q3config.cfg.zip

Tags: raspberry_pi_b+, raspi, quake_3, raspberry_pi_2, raspberry_pi_space, raspberrypi, quake_3_arena