NVIDIA/ASUS 3800 VANTA - how to get HW openGL going?

[Stagea]

Bought Quake ten or so years ago, tried netplay, but hopeless over a modem and with the PC I had then, just now discovered people are still playing Quake, so am trying again. Wow, everyone is so skilled! Played my first game yesterday running around like an idiot, getting killed by everyone, good fun! (Even got killed with an axe, oh the humiliation!)

I got myself up and running with ProQuake, and I'd like to get GLProQuake going. My computer is a joke, but it might be enough to play GLQuake. I've got D3DQuake8 running at 800x600 @ 30-40fps, so I thought OpenGL might be able to do similar, but I think I can't get it out of software GL. (I realise that res/fps is ridiculous these days, but I used to play 320x200 @ 15fps, so for me it's still amazing.

The card is a NVIDIA/ASUS 3800 VANTA 16MB AGP4x. I believe this is a Riva TNT's retarded sibling. nVidia don't have a specific driver for it that I could find (or do they?), I tried their generic driver, but the computer crashed every 5 minutes. I used the latest ASUS driver specific to this card, and now it's stable. I know the card is rubbish, but I thought it might be able to do as well as a Voodoo 1. Everest reports that the card supports all the OpenGL stuff it knows about.

I initially had all the problems described in this thread:
Sticky Thread Easily Fix Glide2x.dll Error, GFX.wad Error, etc.
But that's OK now. However I'm still stuck at about 5fps with GLProQuake. What am I missing?

Cheers!

[Baker]

Hmmm ... I'm not familiar with that card but I could get 30-40 FPS with a Voodoo and my old 400 Mhz Windows 98 machine back in the day.

I'm assuming that you have an older computer and that this video card is also an older one. I would recommend using 640 x 480 resolution with 16 bpp.

c:\quake\glpro -width 640 -height 480 -bpp 16

The above should run at least a little faster than 800 x 600.

Beyond that, if you are only getting 5 FPS with such a vanilla/no special graphics Quake like GL ProQuake, that isn't a good sign that there is much tweaking you can do to improve the FPS much.

You might consider using wqpro instead (non-GL ProQuake) with a 640 x 480 resolution if you can't get GL to work acceptably fast.

[Stagea]

Yeah it's a Duron 800, Win98SE, 512MB, etc. Well I don't know what I changed, in fact I don't think I changed anything (?restart computer?), but now it is working properly. It was using the Microsoft software OpenGL renderer before, and now it's using the NVIDIA hardware OpenGL renderer, and timedemo demo2 was 53fps @ 640x480 16bpp, 32fps @ 800x600. So that's good enough. Looks very nice to me (I'm used to blocky pixellated graphics). Thanks for the quick reply.

Another newb question - I seem to recall back in the day there was a utility called GLQPlus, a graphic interface to tweak OpenGL variables. Is there anything around like that now suitable for ProQuake?

Edit: Sorry, I'll read through *all* the guides, then I'll come back, probably my question will dissolve.

Cheers!

[Baker]

Thanks for the quick reply.

No problem, chief :d

Another newb question - I seem to recall back in the day there was a utility called GLQPlus, a graphic interface to tweak OpenGL variables. Is there anything around like that now suitable for ProQuake?

I haven't heard of that utility. Many of the engines let you play around with graphics settings in the Quake console (Qrack, DarkPlaces, etc.) and even the vanilla GLQuake engines like GL ProQuake have elementary settings (http://console.planetquake.gamespy.c...nds/quake.html)

[Spirit]

Vanta is a stripped down TNT, yes. Try running glproquake in 16 bit colordepth (-bpp 16), this could double the framerate. Do other opengl things work? What fps do you get in the original glquake?


edit: Oh well, it was solved.... =)