The Quake benchmark sheet that I've been gathering data for now has a few nice new additions, thanks to a local friend of mine. We picked at each other's brains a bit until we came up with a nicer way to organize some of the data, and a way to factor all of that into a newer, abstracted Performance Index (yes, inspired by Forza Motorsport).
Get a closer look at this nonsense over this way.
The Performance Index, in short, multiplies the screen resolution (X pixels * Y pixels) and the bit depth (divided by 8, so 8-bit is 1, 16-bit is 2, etc.), then divides by the average run time, and then cuts the value in half if it is using a hardware renderer - then normalizes the whole thing by square-rooting the whole thing. I don't have any particular reason for building the formula that way, just that the numbers look a bit nicer and less absurd further up the scale. (And then I drop the decimal places for sake of it looking cleaner.)
Now, sure, this is still not exactly a professional benchmark. 3DMark and Cinebench, I am not. But now I have a slightly nicer metric to compare modern systems against older ones, because 60 FPS in low-res software mode is a very different beast than 60 FPS in 4K OpenGL.
If you want to see your machine in here, instructions are in row 1 of the sheet; I just need 4 runs of timedemo demo1 and the full hardware specs of your machine. I'm especially looking for any non-x86 machines if anybody has any wacky old ones to submit, I know there's Quake for SGI, and I'd really love to get, say, a real Acorn RISC PC or a Transmetal Crusoe-based machine in here. Get in touch via these comments or my askbox, I'd love to hear from you!
