Techokami

Some time ago, I got very bored.

Boredom is a very powerful thing with me. Becuase when I have nothing else to do, I get strange ideas, often times ones that only appeal to myself. Such is the nature of neurodivergence, I suppose. But in this particular instance - apparently the 30th of April, 2022, going by the date stamp of this image - boredom became Science, in the Adam Savage sense. ("The difference between screwing around, and Science, is writing it down." Or however that went.)

The nature of this boredom led me to run Quake benchmarks on two different computers at once, and attempting to gauge how many times the fast machine could complete demo1 in the time it took the slow machine to do the same. The two computers are in no way equivalent. The small one is my Toshiba Libretto 70CT, alias Scarface One via its previous owner. (I don't like to change the names of computers if their owners have given them any.) It is a 120 MHz Pentium MMX; I was unaware that Pentium MMXes came that slow. The larger one is a 2009, 27-inch iMac, alias Aegir. It has 12 years worth of advances in it. The ultimate figure I came to, entirely by vibes, was 11 demos per demo. In other words, Aegir can finish demo1, eleven times, in the time it takes Scarface One to do the same, despite the vast differences in screen resolution, hardware acceleration, and underlying OS.

So I did what any good scientist did and wrote it all down. And then I ran more tests and wrote those down to. Which gave birth to the silliest spreadsheet I've got access to. And you can contribute to it, too.

Ultimately, my goal with this spreadsheet is to find the most hilarious edge-cases in the process of benchmarking the original Quake, and eventually figure out how to compile this data into a CPUBoss-like interactive comparison chart. I'm not very good at that kind of scripting, even though I'm fairly sure Google Sheets is capable of it. But more important than the scripting is the data, and boy have I got a lot of data. Everything from ultra-powerful Ryzen gaming rigs to an emulated 386 with a co-processor, from a Steam Deck to an AliExpress special emulation handheld, from a classic G3 Macintosh to an Amiga 500 whose brains have been replaced with a Raspberry Pi. And I feel like I'm far from done with this, either.

Want to submit your system to this project?

Cool! Well, first of all, install whatever Quake port your system is most comfortable with. I generally target near-vanilla ports (QuakeSpasm appears most frequently; QuakeSpasm Spiked, Ironwail, TyrQuake, or even old builds of TomazQuake would work just as well!). I am not being scientific with graphics settings At All; for LCDs, I've been going with the monitor's native resolution, while for DOS-compatibles, I've been sticking with 320x200 as default. Pick whatever resolution gives the thing the best fighting chance - or go as absurd as possible and try to bog your machine down as badly as you can.

To run the tests:

• Launch Quake, and either start a new game or open the console and type disconnect to go to a quiet console.
• Ensure that vid_vsync is set to 0 (where applicable - I don't think all Quake ports have this?) and any frame rate limiters are disabled.
• From the console, enter timedemo demo1. When the demo ends, it should go to console and show you your performance metrics at the bottom of the message line. If it does not, and tries to load the next level (some Quake ports do this), quickly enter disconnect again. (You may want to bind that to a key just in case.)
• Take note of the [num] frames per second reading, and then run timedemo demo1 again. I need four results from four runs of the timedemo. You do not need to quit and restart the game between them; I find the first run will be very slightly slower than the other three due to asset caching.
• Once you have four FPS readings, submit them to me with the appropriate details of your machine, operating system, Quake port/version, and graphics settings.
• If you have a really cool name for your machine, please let me know, especially if it has a cool story or meaning behind it. Otherwise, I'll list it as username's computer.

I am always looking for more bizarre and absurd hardware to put through the Quake test. Please get in touch especially if you have something absurdly slow. The PCem 386/387 is theoretically as slow as it is possible to get, but I consider that a tool-assisted effort - I'd love to see it happen on a real 386!

(Also get in touch with me if you know how to assemble this data into the aforementioned interactive chart. That's the other half of this whole nonsense and it'll never be truly complete without that.)

The 2013 Mac Pro was a contentious addition to Apple's already-far-too-expensive line up of hideously powerful computers for professionals. Sporting the same quad-core Intel Xeon architecture and AMD FirePro graphics card of its predecessor, Apple made a form-over-function move by cramming the entire machine into a compact cylindrical case that can charitably be mistaken for a wastebasket. Apple kept this design for six years, weathering a storm of derisive criticism, before finally redesigning it again in 2019 to make it look more like a giant cheese grater instead.

Due to the large distaste for the system's form factor, as well as Apple's move to custom silicon and abandonment of the Intel platform, the Trashcan Macs presently go for less than ten percent of their original MSRP on the used-and-refurbished market. This specimen - dubbed "Brokkr" after the Dwarven blacksmith of Norse lore - cost me a mere $230, sporting a 3.7 GHz Xeon, 16 GB of RAM, the 2 GB version of the FirePro graphics card, and a 512 GB solid-state drive. It is a straight upgrade all-round from the 2014 Mac Mini that was previously my Desk Machine.

And, as you can see from the benchmark results above, it is no slouch at Quaking, scoring an average of 861.3 frames per second on DEMO1. A trashcan, it may appear, but a trashcan, it is not.

Around 2009, a local friend and I were visiting a surplus electronics shop, that happened to have a large crate full of mini-ITX server motherboards. The majority of them were already fully populated, only missing peripherals. I, being silly and impressionable and in the mood to Tinker, bought one of them. It is a VIA C3VCM6 board, populated with a VIA C3 Samuel 2 CPU. These are roughly Pentium 3-spec chips, this one in particular clocked at 800 MHz, and comes with onboard sound and video.

So of course I had to stuff Windows 2000 on to it and benchmark Quake.

In software mode under WinQuake, Ferretcage pulls a fairly respectable - but by no means amazing - 50.6 frames per second. Under GLQuake - which I'm quite surprised it's able to run, considering the onboard video is S3-based, a chipset that is notorious for actually slowing down rendering compared to software modes - it pulls an equally respectable 61.8 frames per second.

Honestly, digging Ferretcage out of my closet (where I somehow haven't seen it since 2009?) just reminds me of all the fun we had trying to shove it into this case. Sure, the drives and power supply won't fit in it, but in the 15 years it's been since I've last looked at it, I've learned a few things. I've become aware of the existence of the PicoPSU, and IDE disk-on-modules. Those things alone would grant this thing the ability to run with the lid shut - and if I can figure out where the back panel went (or come up with a suitable replacement), and figure out an arrangement of stand-offs that the board will fit upon, this thing could actually run fully enclosed. I'll have built my very own Little Guy. A Little Guy that might even be useful for those pesky late-90s Windows games, at that!

But until such time as I actually buy the components I'd need to make that happen, Ferretcage undergoes its arguably more important rite of passage: Vaudeville.