Best Client for Aging Laptop?

[ImperiusDamian]

Brief and probably stupid question here!

I'm playing on an aging Dell laptop w/a 1.4Ghz Intel CPU, 1GB of RAM and an Intel 915GM graphics chip.

Which would be the best Q1 client for this setup and how should I configure it?

Forgive me if this is the dumbest question ever! I'm so used to configuring Q2 and Q3 but I've long since lost track of clients and config settings for Q1.

[MH]

There can only be one: mhquake

This will get you over 100 FPS on timedemo demo1 with that hardware; no special configuration needed.

[ImperiusDamian]

There can only be one: mhquake

This will get you over 100 FPS on timedemo demo1 with that hardware; no special configuration needed.

Close enough; 92.6. Although that was at 1024x768 with all the default settings; if I'd tweaked it a bit I'm sure I'd have gotten it way faster.

(For reference, I managed to get 113 FPS in Quake 3 on timedemo four.dm_68 with all the settings on minimum, and that was just from the settings menus, no config.cfg tweaks.)

So yep, going good so far, thanks!
Are there any stress-test demos I can use similar to Quake 2's crusher.dm2?

[MH]

Different things stress it in different ways.

Of the standard ID1 demos, demo1 is the particle monster (I know that sounds odd, but it's actually got the highest particle counts), demo2 is good for underwater effect testing and demo3 is a mixture.

Switch Particle Style to Squares (in Options/Effects) for a little extra speed.

The Marcher Fortress map is good for testing high polycounts; you should get surprisingly high framerates in that.

There's a multiplayer demo called bigass1 which really stresses a lot of the engine hard; most engines perform miserably because of all the skin uploads it needs, as well as a lot of intense action and effects going on. I googled it so you don't have to: http://icculus.org/twilight/file/bigass1.zip

[ImperiusDamian]

Sweet, that's really helpful

Just switching from 1024x768 to 640x480 and turning dynamic lights off boosted my FPS to 151.6 in demo1. Nice!

Going to try switching the particle effects and I'll see what happens and will also test on that bigass1 demo.

[MH]

An interesting quirk I noticed back when I had a 915 - turning anisotropic filtering on (4x seems to be the sweet spot) will give you another slight performance boost. I guess Intel must have an optimized path in their driver for that.

If I could feel happy re-enabling texture compression it could get you close to 200, but Quake's crappy low-res 8-bit textures look really bad with compression. That's one performance/quality sacrifice I really don't want to make.

[ImperiusDamian]

An interesting quirk I noticed back when I had a 915 - turning anisotropic filtering on (4x seems to be the sweet spot) will give you another slight performance boost. I guess Intel must have an optimized path in their driver for that.

They must. That is - interesting. I hadn't heard of that before! Useful little trick there.

If I could feel happy re-enabling texture compression it could get you close to 200, but Quake's crappy low-res 8-bit textures look really bad with compression. That's one performance/quality sacrifice I really don't want to make.

Heh, no kidding. Even Q3 looks HORRIBLE on the lowest settings and I'm not sure I'd be willing to actually PLAY it on those.

BTW I didn't get a boost from changing the particle settings (although that could be due to Firefox running in the bg, heh) but I did get 111.3 FPS out of the bigass1 demo, so I'm very impressed!

[MH]

Most of that probably comes from disabling dynamic lights (I'd be interested in knowing what you get with them enabled - I've a fast path for dynamic lights already done in the last release, and the next release will have extra options for tuning the rate at which they get uploaded). Player skin modifications are all done in a pixel shader (yes, the 915 can run pixel shaders) so don't need to modify the texture at all.

[ImperiusDamian]

Most of that probably comes from disabling dynamic lights (I'd be interested in knowing what you get with them enabled - I've a fast path for dynamic lights already done in the last release, and the next release will have extra options for tuning the rate at which they get uploaded). Player skin modifications are all done in a pixel shader (yes, the 915 can run pixel shaders) so don't need to modify the texture at all.

Seems like there's not much difference with dynamic lights on or off. Got 114FPS with them on (and particles changed back to dots). I think the biggest change was going from 1024x768 to 640x480, TBH.

[MH]

Seems like there's not much difference with dynamic lights on or off. Got 114FPS with them on (and particles changed back to dots). I think the biggest change was going from 1024x768 to 640x480, TBH.

That sounds roundabout right; Intels are not bad at all with dynamic lights (once you get the trick of doing them right) but seem to be more fillrate limited than anything else. 800x600 was what I found to be a happy medium with my old 915.

[ImperiusDamian]

That sounds roundabout right; Intels are not bad at all with dynamic lights (once you get the trick of doing them right) but seem to be more fillrate limited than anything else. 800x600 was what I found to be a happy medium with my old 915.

Sounds good. Anyways I know I get decent FPS with your client so I'll be using that one

Q3 is a different story, of course. With everything off I get 112 FPS; everything on, it drops to 27. Of course, that's running a demo similar to bigass1 in its intensity, so YMMV.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Back in the day,I used 16bit for everything because I got better performance with it vs 32bit.

I also noted I used to exclusively play Quake in windowed mode ,it also provided better performance for me. This was using hardware I no longer have, but it was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance. I don't know if there is any relevance to things now days though, but it might squeeze out some more performance.

[ImperiusDamian]

Back in the day,I used 16bit for everything because I got better performance with it vs 32bit.

I also noted I used to exclusively play Quake in windowed mode ,it also provided better performance for me. This was using hardware I no longer have, but it was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance. I don't know if there is any relevance to things now days though, but it might squeeze out some more performance.

I've noticed windowed mode tends to decrease my performance, oddly enough. But I sometimes switch to it anyway if I'm doing other stuff while playing.

[Spike]

windowed mode will decrease performance because it has to copy instead of flip. only way I can think of getting better performance in windowed mode is if you're using a lower res or if it doesn't have vsync active when windowed.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

This was using OpenGL clients ,and was many years ago on a desktop,using a Radeon 9200.