Quake: How it runs on a 1994 PC - Intel Pentium 90 MHz / ATi Mach 64 / AWE32 - MS-DOS (Software)

[@MNN-s2h]

In 96 my parents bought this 166MMX with 16MB, and a friend of ours came to install some games: Doom, Quake, GP2 etc. I remember him starting Quake and saying: "Wow, this is fast. My machine can barely run...". He had a 133Mhz from Cyrix, which I believe lacked of FPU, so it was very slow for games that used FPU intensively like this one.

[@xfragboix]

Massive nostalgia hit. Played Quake my brother's on PI-166MMX (OC'd to 208Mhz) with S3 Trio 64V+ 1Mb.

[@ricardofsjr]

My first pc was a Pentium-S 133mhz with a SiS graphics card (1mb) and this is more or less how i remember playing it :')

[@dipshidian]

OK, so Quake doesn’t run amazingly well but it’s not godawful by any means. I’m sure the Mach64 isn’t the fastest VGA card around, yet it seems to handle things fairly well. Is this the “Crysis of 1996”? In some ways, yes. It performs somewhere in the ballpark of other texture-mapped games from around this time, such as Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, Tomb Raider, Earthsiege 2 (etc.) at 320x200 or so. However, when I try playing Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries on this CPU I get horrendous performance (!) with terrain texture mapping enabled, so I guess that game gets the “Crysis crown” in that regard.

[@scheeseman486]

The thing that makes Quake stand out from those other titles is that it's environments have higher polygon density, use perspective correct texture mapping, high precision polygon rendering and to top that off, lightmaps. Given all that it's performance is kind of a miracle, Carmack and Abrash made a hell of a team.

[@dipshidian]

@@scheeseman486 Those are great points! OK, allow me to rephrase my opening comment. Quake is definitely a top candidate for “Crysis of ‘96” and it was clearly programmed very competently (Abrash is quite the interesting character). Light mapping was introduced here, just like how (screen-space) ambient occlusion was in Crysis! The wavy water and portal surfaces are really nice touches too and so is the fact that characters are made from complete meshes instead of being constructed from polygon chunks (a la Mario 64 etc.). When I said that Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries won the “Crysis crown” it was mostly meant as an insult to Mercenaries and its awful performance LOL. Mechwarrior 2 (1995) wasn’t very well-optimized and neither are the other “Mech2 Engine” games by Activision.

[@Agonyrate]

Quake 1 Pushed hardware to its Limits so much, that it killed the cpu brand Cyrix, thats how technologically advanced Quake and IdTech 2 engine was in 1996, people had to wait till 1998 to upgrade to a pentium 2 400mhz to get stable 30-35fps on software mode, and in 1999 a pentium 3 800mhz would run Quake 1 flawlessly and smoothly at 60-101fps smoothly on GLQuake (opengl)