Three versions of Quake 2. Three operating systems. One computer, one Voodoo 2 Card.

Quake 2 Voodoo 2 Showdown

by Nathan Raymond

Introduction

In our first article, we look at Quake 2 Voodoo 2 performance in three different enviroments on the same underlying hardware, a 300Mhz platinum G3 desktop. While Quake 2 has just recently been released for MacOS 8.x (ported by Logicware, published by Activision), it has been available for several months for MacOS X Server. Quake 2 was ported to MacOS X Server for free by Omni Development, long time NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP developers. This showdown will finally answer the question, "Which Mac OS gives the best Quake 2 Voodoo 2 performance?"

For comparisons sake, we'll also take a look at Quake 2 under emulation, in this case running on Windows 95 in Connectix Virtual PC 2.1.3, using the same Voodoo 2 card. In this setup, the actual 3D rendering hardware is not emulated, as Virtual PC maps the Voodoo 2 card in as a PCI device within the emulated Windows environment.

A 12MB Voodoo 2 is currently the highest performance 3D video card usable directly under Virtual PC (Voodoo 1 being the other; Voodoo 3 is a 2D as well as 3D card and thus not mappable to the emulated Windows environment). This should give an idea of how much slowdown emulation imposes on running a 3D intensive emulated PC game like Quake 2 compared to the native MacOS, for those readers interested in using a Voodoo 2 with a software emulator to play PC games.