[back]OpenGL setup (GLSetup)

GL what up?

An important thing to do that's often overlooked when trying to get the best performance for Q3A out of your on the installation disc.

Driving Miss Daisy

Oddly it's these openGL drivers that seems to make more difference to q3's performance then your 'default' graphics card drivers. As an example, one of my machines has the classic Voodoo3 2000 in place (16MB by the way). The default drivers (dated 13-07-99) that come on the CD don't run q3 very well, missing polygons, transparent surfaces and generally a crap experience..! (as an aside here, it gets a little weird and I'm not sure I've imagined it but I get pretty good connection to the net using these drivers!).

I installed/updated to the latest available drivers, at the time (dated 07-05-2000) and the graphics problems disappeared (with a little fiddling around with the q3 game settings) but, my connection to the net took longer and wasn't quite so good, go figure..!.

Mines a turbo charged, fuel injected

Installing the GLSetup drivers do make a hell of a difference, the game is so much more stable than before and there are no texture/polygon/drawing problems. The GLSetup on the Q3A disc I've got is now 'old' so it's best to follow the link to the web site and down load the latest 'installer' which when executed will install the latest openGL drivers for your specific graphics card, it does this over the net mind, so if your using a 28/33/56k modem it may take some time to do; total installation is about 5MB for all the various files needed.

It's a must to run this really as graphics card manufacturers don't seem to update their own drivers too often, usually the graphics card drivers supplied on the products installation CD are the latest drivers!

A friend of a friend of a friend told me

Graphic card drivers are an area where you either have problems or you don't, there doesn't seem to be a 'happy middle ground' with them. The Voodoo's generally can handle q3 quite well without the GLSetup drivers but, and as an example, a friend (yes I do have a life outside of Quake...! as do we all..!) is currently running a Voodoo3 3000 using the Voodoo3 2000 drivers because of the bad Q3A performance he gets from the 3000's drivers [what he actually said was he had to install the V3 3000 using the 2000 drivers, he then 'updates' these drivers with the 3000's (control panel > my computer > system properties > device manager > display adapters -click the 'driver' tab). He can't install the card using the original V3 3000 drivers, it does what was described above- missing polygons/textures, transparent surfaces etc..], this might be down to all sorts of things, motherboard BIOS/drivers/support, AGP drivers, PCI bus drivers, IR. conflicts, BMA conflicts, hardware conflicts etc., etc. I think you get the picture..! It doesn't take much to throw a system out of whack.

Some cards really do need the GLSetup, one in particular is the Diamond Stealth s540 (I have one of these in another system), it won't have it at all! Whether this is down to the chipset, the S3 Savage4, or the card I don't know, but it definitely needs the GLSetup to be run to get good Q3A game performance. Once done it's fine, it actually give better colour then the Voodoo but it doesn't have the sharpness or the speed.

Almost finished!

Two cards I'm dying to get my sticky mitts on are the ATI Radeon chipset card and the GForce chipset cards. I've been reliably informed that the GForce card itself is good but the drivers aren't too hot on NT platform... mmmm. Worth investigating.

Finished

Maybe it's me, and I am a little fussy at times, I expect a graphics card to run a game like q3 straight out of the box, I don't especially expect to have to install further drivers to get it all working.. Ah well, one can only q3dream..!