Renderer Speed Comparison IOQuake3 vs. XreaL
Now I want to show you the need of Vertex Buffer Object based rendering. Usually most open source quake based game engines have a similar renderer design to id Tech 3 nowadays. They usually use vertex arrays (VA) or compiled vertex arrays (CVA) that they create every frame by processing the entire scene geometry. You usually find this practice in IOQuake3 (of course), all IOQuake3 based games like Urban Terror or Tremulous, Q2E, QFusion, Overdose (at least an old version) and Alien Arena. This is a design that worked well in 1999 but it is a quite bad practice in 2009.
XreaL follows the advices of GDC papers and uses VBO based rendering for almost everything to avoid this horrible CPU bottleneck. The model geometry is uploaded like textures and don’t have to move over the PCIe bridge every frame.
There is a nice heavy benchmark map called tvy-bench.pk3 for Quake3 by hipshot that could be found at http://www.zfight.com. It is really nice and contains a test scene with really many polygons.
To make it short. Traditional renderers don’t give you more than 30 fps no matter what high-end GFX card you have. The XreaL renderer gives you more than stable 125 fps.
IOQuake3 with 22 fps in 1280×768:
XreaL renders it with 148 fps:
Tags: VBO

mazing, your work is fantastic, it seems that finally we will have a free game with graphics to match the commercial games,
and with a decent framerate ;9
great job!! amazing fps
Hi, I follow the developement of this engine sinse it started I think. Lately I was wondering if the team would implement outdoor scenes and vehicles (two of the mayor features in my opinion for a modern fps), that surely would make this a killer engine for any opensource game project based on it.
Congratulations for all you achieved so far and looking foward to the next update. Bye
Heh, to be fair on q3, you’re not rendering alot of the particle/shader effects that Q3 is…
The smoke is missing, as is the large particles coming up off the water.
You are right. A few shaders are broken. However it renders the majority (90%) of the particle effects like the rain fine.
As a quick test I disabled all the same stuff in q3 and got nearly double fps. Still nowhere near your impressive work though.
According to rivatuner MX440 does that VBO.
Helllo:)
Can you make a comparison in rendering between Quake 4 and Xreal
Doom3 and Xreal
Wonder if it would be possible to create a Call of Duty 4 “clone” from the xreal engine?Games like Assault Cube,Urban Terror look horribly outdated.Linux needs a good military shooter to go along with all the space shooters.
i am so glad you did this. this makes a lot of sense.
@Vince: There is one military shooter (on XreaL game engine) in works – Code 43: Urban warfare (http://www.code43.net – not much news on the site yet, too busy with dev work)
I’m pretty sure that Alien Arena also uses VBO for some things as well. Still, really impressive work with this engine.