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This is really cool and impressive... but relatedly... Has anyone figured out what the minimum specs for Quake are? I feel like the first thing everyone does
by xracy 7mo ago
This is really cool and impressive... but relatedly...
Has anyone figured out what the minimum specs for Quake are?
I feel like the first thing everyone does with a computer is to determine whether or not it can run quake, and I'm just wondering what the like, most simple computer that could exist is, that could run quake?
- conception 7mo agoThat’s only because everything can run Doom now.
- klodolph 7mo agoYou can find a lot of discussion about what the minimum specs for Quake are. Famously, it needs a decent FPU, and the Pentium was a convenient early CPU with a decent built-in FPU. It was significantly faster than a 486. …But people have managed to run Quake on the 486. And the myth people tell about Quake is that it killed Cyrix, because Quake performance on Cyrix was subpar. But was that true? And if it was true, was that because the Cyrix was slower than a Pentium, or was it because the Quake code had assembly that was hand-optimized for the Pentium FPU pipeline? Anyway. “Most simple computer that could run Quake” is probably going to include a decent FPU. If you are implementing something on an FPGA, you can probably get somewhere around 200 MHz clock anyway. At which point you can run Quake II.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agocan it be rewritten to use fixed point arithmetic instead?
- Narishma 7mo agoThe PS1 doesn't an FPU but got a version of Quake 2, so it's possible. That said, it was somewhat different from the PC version, so it could be argued that it's not the same game.
- klodolph 7mo agoThe PS1 version definitely has its own engine, which is not just a port of the Quake 2 engine to the Playstation, but a new engine.
- jasonwatkinspdx 7mo agoI can't speak on Quake, but I was a level designer on the failed effort to port Unreal to PSX. My understanding from talking to the coders at the time was that Unreal's software renderer was a huge advantage as a starting point. They were able to reuse a lot of the portal rendering stuff as setup on the R3K cpu, but none of the rasterization. That had to go to the graphics core, which was a post setup 2D engine that in addition to the usual sprites, could do tris and quads. We had a budget of about 3k polygons post clipping, and having two enemies on screen would burn about half of that. The other huge limit is the texture cache was tiny, so we couldn't do lightmaps. Our lightning was baked in at vertex level and it just was what it was. There's a bit more info here: https://www.terrygreer.com/unrealpsx.html https://www.terrygreer.com/unrealpsx.html I imagine the situation with Quake was comparable. The BSP stuff would carry right over, but I can't imagine they got lightmapping proper working at the time. They'd also need some sort of solution for overdraw, as Quake's PVS was a lot more loose than Unreal's portal clipping.
- ndepoel 7mo agoThe PS1 version uses a custom engine based on technology built for the game Shadow Master, the previous title by Hammerhead Studios. It was a technical tour de force for the original PlayStation.
- klodolph 7mo agoI want to look at this from a different perspective… a single-precision floating-point multiply is pretty simple, no? 24x24 bit multiply, which is about half as many gates as a 32x32 bit multiply. Maybe I would prefer to rip out the integer multiplication unit first, before ripping out the FPU.
- rasz 7mo agoSure, but then you need CPU that is twice as fast :). Playstation did it by pushing geometry calculations to GTE.
- ndepoel 7mo agoYes but also no. The problem with fixed point arithmetic is a lack of dynamic range compared to floating point. Floats are great at representing both large numbers with limited precision and small numbers with high precision, but with fixed point you have to make a choice based on which kind of number you're trying to represent. Meaning you need to use a mixture of 8.24, 16.16 and 24.8 fixed point types (and appropriate conversions) depending on the context of the calculations that you're doing. It's possible to write a game engine with that limitation, but there's no easy natural conversion from Quake's judicious use of floats to a fully fixed-point codebase. You'd have to redesign and rewrite the entire engine from scratch, basically.
- polpo 7mo agoI had a Cyrix 6x86 when Quake first came out. My disappointment at how poorly Quake ran on it was significant, especially because pretty much every other game at the time ran well on the Cyrix. The FPU performance in Quake was doubly handicapped on the Cyrix: not only was its FPU slower than the Pentium's to begin with, Quake's code was indeed hand-optimized for the Pentium's FPU pipeline. Fabien Sanglard's writeup of Michael Abrash's optimizations for Quake goes into great detail: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_asm_optimizations/ https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_asm_optimizations/
- genxy 7mo agoI wonder in an alternate timeline, if Cyrix had worked with Carmack to get a patch for Cyrix, how the outcomes would have changed.
- rasz 7mo agoCyrix was physically incapable of pipelining FPU instructions. Without Pentium Quake would have had to wait two more years for commodification of CPUs delivering similar floating point performance. https://thandor.net/benchmark/33 https://thandor.net/benchmark/33 Quake needed March 1994 Pentium 90-100 to deliver ~smooth 25fps. Cyrix released similarly performing 6x86MX PR200 in May 1997, AMD K5-PR166 January 1997. Quake was unfeasible till ~1998 at the earliest to be able to sell playable game.
- jasonwatkinspdx 7mo agoMy perspective from being a teen doing lan party stuff at the time: Quake ran slow on them, but it was far from the only thing that ran slow. Cyrix was well understood to be the value brand for general office apps and such, but not up to it for more demanding computing, and for having random compatibility issues here and there. Ultimately what killed Cyrix is they just couldn't offer enough of a discount vs intel to matter, especially with all the lock in stuff intel was doing with Dell, Gateway, etc. Intel Inside was a successful marketing campaign as well. If you were around back then I bet you can imagine the jingle/chord immediately.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago[flagged]
- 6581 7mo ago> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your entire comment history seems to be AI generated.
- Foobar8568 7mo agoQuake ran like shit on 486dx33, a few fps at best.
- apgwoz 7mo agoI played Quake on a 486 66Mhz DX2 with 16MB of RAM in the 90s. On the lowest resolution, but it was fine.
- Foobar8568 7mo agoI had a 486dx33 and it was unplayable, a few frames per second...
- apgwoz 7mo agoI honestly don’t remember what the frame rate was, but it definitely improved when I upgraded to a Pentium 100. I distinctly remember a buddy giving me some RAM (2x4MB) which allowed me to play on the 486. I was so happy! The DX2s _were_ a significant improvement over the 486DX, but I’ll admit, I might be remembering the excitement of getting to play Quake at all! The framerate may have been 15-20 fps and I just dealt with it, The minimum requirements, on the box, were apparently Pentium 75Mhz. 8MB (DOS), or 16 RAM (WIN95).
- rasz 7mo agoQuake DX2 framerate is 5-7 depending on rest of the setup.
- justsomehnguy 7mo agoAs other had said: the only 'deal breaker' here is FPU. Q1 is playable but not on any modern understanding of that word on a system with Am486DX4/100 with 16MB RAM and S3 Trio64V+. You can disable sound effects for a couple FPS more. Mostly you would be fine because the level design in Q1 heavily tends to the closed spaces and corridors with only a glimpses of the outside and a rare halls and caverns. That being said the Necropolis would be a test of strategic thinking for turn-based FPS and Ziggurat Vertigo is unplayable.
- fraktl 7mo ago[dead]