Big ioquake3 framerate hits on 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max

[terrorhurts]

Hey guys! Thank you so much for keeping ioquake3 alive. Its so enjoyable to be able to play a game I know and love on my brand new MacBook Pro 16" M1 Max. I had a performance related question - I notice that generally the game runs very well but there is this situation that makes it slow to a crawl. I am using the M1 binary and I have also confirmed this issue using the latest x86 only binary.

I have noticed situations where my framerate goes down to 10fps or so. It happens mostly in wide scenes on maps like Q3CTF4, and especially during use of the railgun, my framerate gets hammered. I don’t think it should ever do that especially on this hardware so Im wondering if you’ve heard of that and know why that happens? I am using the high res texture pack as well with all the visual goodies on in my config. Not sure if I have to do anything else to activate those 512x512 textures in a self-hosted multiplayer game against bots but it does look beautiful so I think theyre active. Let me know if you want me to send along a game play video or something. It does seem like these moments are more math intensive as the map is at its largest and the railgun contrail is perhaps more complex than others. Happy to include.

I had a situation with another app on the M1 (Jump Desktop) where somehow it was written to only use the efficiency cores and would max them out sometimes while doing very little. It was odd. Maybe thats helpful here as I am running ioquake3 in a window and can see my CPU meter in the menubar and it seems like it sticks to E cores.

[terrorhurts]

@tomkidd not sure if you’re the dev on duty but I saw you posted the notification about the M1 binary so thought Id tag.

[MrNuclearMonster]

It’s probably possible to optimize more for the M1 lineup but it’s unlikely to happen unless we get more apple expertise. This issue could be down to the efficiency core issue (here’s a photo of my CPU History chart on q3ctf4). There might be very different results by disabling the OpenGL 2 renderer.

[terrorhurts]

Thanks for the reply. Are you using the high res textures as well? You seem to have a M1 Pro or Max as well. From where you are on the railgun perch, when I shoot viewing the whole map it slows to like 15fps. Do you see the same?

Update: I went back to opengl1 and this completely alleviated the issues. However, it for sure does not look as nice.

[terrorhurts]

@MrNuclearMonster One other question for you - is there a console command that I could put into an exec file or into my config that will push the game to a secondary display? It used to be that the primary was r_device 0 I think and your secondary would be r_device 1 but Ive tried seta r_device 1 to no avail. I can always set my external as the primary (untested but I suspect it would work) but Im wondering if you have another way.