Most of slowdown in Q3 engine come from the fact that the CPU have to send to the video card all the visible geometry for every screen refresh.
However, new video card can store permanently in its VRAM some static objet, so the bandwidth of AGP/PCI will not be flooded with that.
The good news is that our concurrent game, Urban Terror, is about to add VBO support to their engine, and the code source can be found from their forum. They will eventually propose a patch to ioQ3 in the future.
Here some screenies I have made on my map, just at the place FPS are the lower:
44 FPS
Here I have simply copied my map under my Urban Terror directory, without recompile it:
63 FPS
Now using their experimental VBO support:
83 FPS
I gain 20 FPS on my old computer (AMD 2400+ with nvidia 5200 FX).
This is more impressive on newer computer, my brother got:
- ~110 FPS with SG engine
- 130~140 FPS with UT engine
- 210~220 FPS with UT with VBO support engine
Very interesting, no ?