Net Play Quake 2 Scores

All tests were run in three consecutive iterations and averaged, except for Logicware's Quake 2 v1.0.1 for MacOS 8.6, which could not load massive1.dm2 or crusher.dm2 more than once per launch without generating an OpenGL driver error in Quake 2, necessitating a quit and re-launch of the application for each run. Raw scores are in the following table, rated in fps (frames per second).

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The tests massive1 and crusher are both demonstrative of what intense multi-player online games are like. They seriously tax a CPU and graphics card. The graph above demonstrates just how much.

If you're considering Virtual PC and a Voodoo 2 for online gaming with a first person shooter like Quake 2, think again. Crusher returned a score not just below 10fps, but below 5. Totally unusable for online first-person shooter gaming, unless your primary interest is in looking at the details in individual frames.

While MacOS X Server and MacOS 8.6 both turned in respectable near 30fps scores for massive1, they dipped below the critical 20fps on crusher, indicating that a 300Mhz G3 might actually be a slight handicap (at least with untweaked settings) in worst-case scenario Quake 2 net play.

Interestingly, the fps lead that MacOS X Server enjoyed in the single player tests has been narrowed to a mere 5.5% average here in net play. Subjectively, the timedemos seemed to run a little smoother on MacOS X Server, though the overall scores weren't much higher than MacOS 8.6 in these very CPU intensive tests.

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Confirming the results from the single player scores, the CPU is the bottleneck in all three cases here. There is no significant deviation in timedemo results in 800x600 over 640x480. There would be a decrease in performance at 800x600 if the Voodoo 2 was being maxxed out and the CPU had no trouble feeding it.