Back when OpenGL accelerated hardware became a thing at the consumer level (and even non OpenGL, like the Rendition Verite v1000E !) games like Quake suddenly took on an entirely new life, with the amazing ‘realism’ that OpenGL could bring. And what an amazing change it was from the software renderer.

I had bought the Diamond Fire GL 1000, and it honestly kinda sucked. It did the OpenGL demo’s okayish under Windows NT, but Quake, not so much. But it was a sign of things to some, as I could run the 3D pipes screensaver without running the CPU at 100% But the Fire was meant more so for ‘adult’ or productive things, not for playing a game.

Oh how times haven’t changed all that much.

At any rate, Quake II for the RTX, has been updated on Steam. It’s hard to believe it, but it looks even more so amazing than before. The ‘solid glass’ option looks pretty nice too.

At the moment I don’t have anything else really RTX ready so to speak. But it ssure looks pretty amazing!

I’ve long since lost all my stuff, but I do remember the ‘switch’ from DKBTrace to POV-Ray.

I did lament at the time that doing a good ‘quality’ render could take a week or more… And power in South Florida being a ‘best effort service’ wasn’t very forgiving for those of us on FPL. But it was still very neat and exciting for the time. OpenGL kind of killed that as now you could do ‘good enough’ stuff in realtime!

Anyways I was googling around checking out pageranks (I know so shameless) when I came across Kurt Bangert’s page, that included a POV-Ray scene with some fun filled Fortran stuff.

So after downloading the files, and the latest POV-Ray (3.7), and fixing a trivial line I was able to render the above picture in 16 minutes!!

I figured by now POV-Ray could support SMP, and found the new beta version, that supports SMP! So on my HP laptop with 4 cores, and hyperthreading enabled, I was able to render the scene in 1.5 minutes in 1024×768 resolution!!

The Fortran printout is the ‘adventure’ cave game, along with another variation of the snoopy Fortran calendar.