A fork of the popular GLQuake descendant QuakeSpasm with a focus on high performance instead of maximum compatibility, with a few extra features sprinkled on top.
On most maps performance is indeed not much of a concern on a modern system. In recent years, however, some mappers have tried more ambitious/unconventional designs with poly counts far exceeding those of the original id Software levels from 25 years ago. It's also not uncommon for players of such an old game to be using hardware that is maybe not the latest and greatest, struggling on complex maps when using traditional renderers. By moving work from the CPU to the GPU (culling, lightmap updates) and taking advantage of more modern OpenGL features (instancing, compute shaders, persistent buffer mapping, indirect multi-draw, bindless textures), this fork is capable of handling even the most demanding maps at very high framerates. To avoid physics issues the renderer is also decoupled from the server (using code from QSS, via vkQuake).
- real-time palettization (with optional dithering) for a more authentic look
- more options exposed in the UI, most of them taking effect instantly (no vid_restart needed)
- classic underwater warp effect
- support for lightmapped liquid surfaces
- lightstyle interpolation (e.g. smoothly pulsating lighting in ad_tears)
- reduced heap usage (e.g. you can play tershib/shib1_drake and peril/tavistock without using -heapsize on the command line)
- reduced loading time for jumbo maps
- slightly higher color/depth buffer precision to avoid banding/z-fighting artifacts
- a more precise
hackwork-around for the z-fighting issues present in the original levels - capped framerate when no map is loaded
| Minimum GPU | Recommended GPU | |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA | GeForce GT 420 ("Fermi" 2010) | GeForce GT 630 or newer ("Kepler" 2012) |
| AMD | Radeon HD 5450 ("TeraScale 2" 2009) | Radeon HD 7700 series or newer ("GCN" 2012) |
| Intel | HD Graphics 4200 ("Haswell" 2012) | HD Graphics 620 ("Kaby Lake" 2016) or newer |
Notes:
- These requirements might not be 100% accurate since they are based solely on reported OpenGL capabilities. There could still be unforeseen compatibility issues.
- Mac OS is not supported at this time due to the use of OpenGL 4.3 (for compute shaders), since Apple has deprecated OpenGL after version 4.1.