Better Quake?

(Ed.note: We have not tried these, so if they trash your installation or more, well, that’s the price pioneers pay. Since I’m
not a Quake player, it seems to me those who are could make a much better judgment as to how well these modified DLLs work.–Ed)

While these DLLS aren’t exactly ‘AMD’ Optimized, they were profiled on my Thunderbird system with the IntelC compiler (using -O3 -Qipo -Qunroll -QxiM -Qprof_genx settings).

When I do general Q3 testing of the CPU/FSB/RAM, I like to take the video card as much as I can out of the picture.. so I run with everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) off. That includes r_picmip 10, sound off, cg_draw2d 0, and in 640×480.

Anyway, after profiling these dll’s, I gained 50 FPS, from 400 to ~450fps in ‘four’.

In a demo I made in NV15Demo I went from 91 to 96 fps. This is in WinXP on my AMD Tbird 1.0 @ 1.61, 140fsb, 4x agp, full memory tweaks, etc.

While these do not give any better 3DNow support, it definitely does help Tbirds. When I get an AthlonXP this Christmas, I’ll re-compile it with -QxiK. I would expect further improvement, due to the XP being able to use SSE.

Anyway grab the dll’s from here. The DLLs should also work fine on Durons and AthlonXP’s but of course the future -QxiK dll’s would be best for Morgan/AthlonXP’s.

If you do any Q3 testing, I highly recommend these be used on any AMD tested box.

Anyway let me know what you think.

During profiling, I did run through the game as much as possible (using various options, etc). That way the profiler could gather as much optimization information as possible, so you should be able to see a decent increase in any video resolution, vertex or lightmapping, bi or trilinear filter, etc.

Update: Unzip the dll’s into your Quake3baseq3 directory.

You *MUST* add these lines into either your autoexec.cfg or q3config.cfg (both found in quake3baseq3)

seta blindlyloaddlls 1
seta vm_ui “0”
seta vm_cgame “0”
seta vm_game “0”

After that just load up Q3 as you always have and enjoy the fps increase.

Also if you don’t want to add that yourself just unzip this whole file into your baseq3 dir and double click on “dllset.bat”. It will add the stuff to your autoexec.cfg w/o overwriting anything and if you
don’t have an autoexec.cfg it’ll create one for you.

Here are some tests I’ve done with these.

Quake3 (totally fresh) v1.30.
Bios settings: CAS2, 4-way interleave, Turbo, 4k page blocks
4x AGP was DISABLED (2x agp used) and fastwrites were DISABLED in bios.
Windows XP Professional w/ DX8.1

Computer specs:

AMD Thunderbird 1GHz (any test over 1GHz = overclocked)
Geforce 2 Ultra with the 23.11 Detonator drivers
Abit KT7a (voltage modified)
512MB PC150

FPS = average over 5 runs.

Quake3 was set to “Normal” quality (no other changes) and run without sound.

Thunderbird 1GHz @ 133fsb – (default cpu/fsb clock for my setup)
With DLL’s = 186.3 fps
Without DLL’s = 163.78 fps

Thunderbird 1.2GHz @ 133fsb

With DLL’s = 204.1 fps
Without DLL’s = 179.12 fps

Thunderbird 1.4GHz @ 133fsb
With DLL’s = 216.5 fps
Without DLL’s = 191.2 fps

Thunderbird 1.6GHz @ 133fsb
With DLL’s = 227.6 fps
Without DLL’s = 201.72 fps

Thunderbird 1.2GHz @ 150fsb
With DLL’s = 216.5 fps
Without DLL’s = 189.58 fps

Thunderbird 1.5GHz @ 150fsb
With DLL’s = 239.1 fps
Without DLL’s = 210.92 fps

Thunderbird 1.62Ghz @ 154fsb – (my normal running overclocked speed)
With DLL’s = 248.5 fps
Without DLL’s = 221.7 fps

Ed.note: Before you do this, go to your quake3baseq3 folder and copy cgamex86.dll, qagame86.dll and uix86.dll to another folder. That way, if things don’t work out, you can put the originals back.

I’ve only tested this with 1.29h-1.30, don’t know if it’ll work on any other versions.

Again let me know. Thanks!

P.S. What’s Profiling? Profiling with the IntelC5 compiler is just compiling it with a type of ‘addon’ inside the program or DLL (whichever you compile). That particular compile will be hellishly slow because everything you do when you use the exe or dll will be recorded for later optimization. It generates the profile/optimization information. Now, when I recompile it will use the generated optimization information producing a much faster exe/dll. The source is exactly the same as what ID Software use’s except I compiled & profiled it for AMD Thunderbird systems. Now, some people have reported they don’t get any more fps and others (like myself) up to a 50 fps increase. This can be done with any sourcecode and the IntelC compiler has options to automatically use MMX, SSE, SSE2 and standard FPU.

Email Aaron