Game:

Quake (1996)

Duration: 0:00

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3

This is the last boring video and then it's on to supporting the other games.

This video highlights the issue with using v1k_surfacelookup 1 with Quake 2 and r_surfacelookup 1 with Quake 1 using RReady.

In Quake 2, the radiosity based lighting use VL_Lookup (V_FIFO_LOOKUP) to generate the dynamic lighting effects. Firing repeatedly lowers the frame rate. Disabling the lookup produces a consistent 60 fps. In this mode the full 16 bit texture is generated using the CPU and uploaded.

In vQuake 1 the timerefresh command is slower. This is because of the overhead of VL_Lookup.

In both these games the latency involved in the surface lookup (8-bit lookup palette selection (possibly including a load), render target change and (for Quake 1, the passthrough of the 8 bit radiosity texture to be converted to 16 bit colour) and host of other state changes slow things down. This is also why the console is ridiculously slow. Every single letter involves a render target change (everything, including palette texture selection). Even if surfacelookup is disabled, the console always uses VL_Lookup.

The only system I've seen this improve performance is a laptop (dual core i3 with SMT and UHD690 graphics), and even then it was only at 320x200. At higher resolutions it chugged.