LinuxQuestions.org - The lighting in Quake3 Arena demo and Linux

You're joking, right?

Let's just compare....

The Radeon 9800:

Quote:

* Eight parallel rendering pipelines
* Four parallel geometry engines
* 256-bit DDR memory interface
* AGP 8X support
* SMARTSHADER™ 2.1
o Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
o 2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
o 2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass
o New F-buffer technology supports pixel shader programs with unlimited instructions
o 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
o Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
o Shadow volume rendering acceleration
o Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® via extensions
* SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
o 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
o Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
o 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
+ Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options
* HYPER Z™ III+
o 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
o Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
o Fast Z-Buffer Clear
o Z cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
* TRUFORM™ 2.0
o 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
o Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
o Displacement mapping
* VIDEOSHADER™
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
o FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
o Noise removal filtering for captured video
* MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
* All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
* YPrPb component output*
* Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
* Dual integrated display controllers
* Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
* Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant and HDCP ready)
* Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
* Windows® Logo Program compliant

The GeForceMX (you don't say which one, but I'll pretend it's the 440):

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Detailed Specs

* GPU Features
o TwinView architecture
o Digital Vibrance Control
o Second generation transform and lighting (T&L) engine
o Integrated Dual-Link TMDS transmitters
o nVidia Shading Rasterizer (NSR)
o High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
o AGP 4X with Fast Writes
o Double Data Rate (DDR) memory
o 32-bit color, 32-bit Z / stencil buffer
o 4 texels per clock
o 256-bit graphics architecture
o Cube environment mapping
o DirectX and S3 texture compression
* 3D Performance
o 700 million texels per second fill rate
o 20 million triangles/sec through Hardware T&L setup
o 2.7 GB/sec memory bandwidth (166MHz SDR SD-RAM)
o 8-64MB frame buffer size
o 350MHz RAMDAC
o Maximum 3D/2D resolution of 2048x1536 @ 75 Hz
o Complete DirectX 7, DirectX 6 and DirectX 5 (!!!) support
o Complete Professional OpenGL 1.2 support
o Single pass multitexturing

* 2D Performance
o Optimized for multiple color depths including 32, 24, 16, 15, and 8-bits per pixel
o True-color hardware cursor
o Multibuffering (double, triple, quad) for smooth animation and video playback
o Full Windows Graphical Device Interface (GDI) Hardware Acceleration

And the features of Quake 3:

Quote:

From an interview with John Carmack, pre-release, posted on Blue's News:
All source artwork is being created and delivered in 24 bit color. An accelerator that can perform all 3D work in 24 bit color will look substantially better than a 16 bit card. You will pay a speed cost for it, though.

Most of the textures are going to be higher resolution. Larger amounts of texture memory will make a bigger difference than it does on Quake 2.

Some key rendering effects require blending modes that some cards don't support.

The fill rate requirements will be about 50% more than Quake 2, on average. Cards that are fill rate limited will slow down unless you go to a lower resolution.

The triangle rate requirements will be at least double Quake 2, and scalable to much higher levels of detail on appropriate hardware.

So, while both these cards would be clearly able to render the game adequately (keep in mind that the cards available at the time were the Voodoo 1, the Voodoo 2, the Permedia 2, the ATI Rage Pro, the Intel I740, the Rendition 2100/2200, the PVR PCX2, and the RIVA 128; I think the TNT was pre-release), clearly the 9800 Pro has a lot more horsepower in a lot of areas that would make it look much better. Not to mention that with a much lower-spec CPU and much less memory, as well as the lower specs of the video card itself (heck, how much memory does the MX have onboard in comparison to the 9800 Pro?) I can hardly believe that you wouldn't have to turn some of the features off to get acceptable performance in the first place, much less expecting it to perform at the same level as a much higher-spec machine. If you want a real test, switch the 9800 Pro into the Linux box and see what it looks like then.

Myself I think you're lucky to get off with just some washed-out colors. But then, I haven't tested my copy of Q3A on this box yet (and I never played it under Windows anyway, so I don't even know what it looks like there). Then again, I'd be running it on my 9800SE, so I won't be much of a gauge to say how it looks in comparison to an MX (or any nVidia card).