The Hardware

The Voodoo 2 card being used in testing is a Creative Labs 12MB Voodoo Blaster. (Any inexpensive, standard PC Voodoo 2 card would do.)

The G3/300 desktop (originally a G3/233, now clocked up to 300) has 512k backside cache running at 150Mhz, 160MB of RAM, and is running MacOS 8.6 and MacOS X Server 1.0.2 each off their own EIDE drive on two seperate controllers.

The emulated PC environment in Virtual PC has 101MB of real memory allocated to it, divided into 87MB of PC memory, 2MB of PC video memory, 10MB of emulator code cache, 1.5MB "other", and 1MB left over.

The Software

'Drivers' are pieces of software, sometimes stored in a format known as 'libraries', that interface software (such as the game Quake 2) to hardware (such as the 3Dfx Voodoo 2). In the case of Quake 2, there are actually two driver layers: the platform independent 3D graphics environment developed and licensed by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) known as OpenGL, and the "Glide" drivers developed by 3dfx for interfacing directly to their 3D cards.

In MacOS X Server, the driver is Omni Development's own port of Glide (Glide 2.54), running on top of their port of 3Dfx's MiniGL. Omni Development has enjoyed a relatively long history with id Software, porting Doom II to NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP way back when (the first Doom was originally developed on NeXT hardware by John Carmack).

In MacOS 8.6, the drivers are the recently released 3dfx 1.0b2 drivers (Glide 2.56 and 3.03) with Miklos Fazekas' MesaQuake2 3.1b8 drivers (a free OpenGL work-alike) and Logicware's ref_gl.lib 1.0.1b1 (a replacement Quake 2 library optimized for use with 3Dfx rather than ATi graphics hardware).

Under Windows 95, the drivers are 3dfx/Creative Lab's latest (Glide 2.54 and 3.01).

Testing is accomplished by bringing up the Quake 2 command line with tilde '~', then enterting 'disconnect', then 'timedemo 1', then 'map [file name].dm2'. Quake 2 will run through a recorded game on one map with all speed governing off (i.e. as fast as it can, like watching a videotape in fast forward). This stresses the CPU and the video card to their max. At the end of the run Quake 2 will display the total time and frames per second on the command line. Entering 'timedemo 0' will turn speed governing back on, and tilde exits from the command line again (timedemo is just an environment variable that Quake 2 looks at to determine whether to use speed governing or not).

The first series of this report will look at out-of-the-box, untweaked settings for the Voodoo 2, Quake 2 OpenGL settings, and the Mesa library (under MacOS 8.x). A variety of hardware settings can be adjusted for the Voodoo 2 card through the use of a "voodoo2.var" file; Mesa settings can be adjusted throught its "MesaSettings" file, and Quake 2 environment variables can be adjusted at the Quake 2 command line or through its "config.cfg" file. For these tests, all settings have been left at their defaults, except resolution.

We'll be comparing two resolutions: 640 by 480, and 800 by 600 (1024 by 768 is only available with two identical Voodoo 2 cards in scanline interleave mode). At each resoultion we'll test four demo maps: demo1, demo2, massive1, and crusher. The first two are single player games, the last two multi-player. At a later date, a second series of tests will be compiled on 'tweaked' settings and the results posted for comparison if they deviate significantly from these.