in 1024x768 on an Athlon 1.7ghz with 512Mb RAM and an on-board geforce 2. It would run in 1280x1024 but in some complex areas it would slow down a tiny bit. 1024 was fine. 

I'm trying to run Fitzquake on a machine running an AMD Athlon 951 MHz processor with 576 MB of RAM on an nVidia GeForce 4 MX graphics card, and it's a complete dog. Is there any way to optimize for slower hardware? 

I was running Fitzquake, glquake, Joequake on an celeron 700 with an intel i810 onboard gfx-card, but only in 512x384x16 and 40-50 fps. I think this gfx card is about the minimum requirement. 

I finally have it working. I bumped down Windows' resolution from 1024x768 to 800x600, and I think Fitzquake is running at 640x480, and everything works great. I was stumped by how a 12-year-old game could still be doggy on a newer system! Thanks for the help. 

windows resolution? It doesn't have anything to do with it.
Fitzquake runs nicely on P3-400 and GF4 MX 64 MB - if the maps are done right. All the id maps are. Even marcher is playable although stutters a little at points. 

I didnt think it did... 

and it's faster than in aguirre's engine. 

that's odd about the speed. i've never had fitz run smoother than aglquake on anything, let alone a massive level like marcher. 

of the Fitzquake 3d engine being slightly optimized for big scenes (don't remember if it's particular only to Fitz). There was talk about it years ago, probably in the Marcher release thread.
So you get more FPS in Marcher because of that. You can do tests with r_drawentities 0 to make it clearer. 

I thought it was the other way around? 

Changes to 0.75:

- totally rewritten bsp drawing code. The new code combines the advantages of the gl_texsort 1 and gl_texsort 0 codepaths from glquake into one codepath that uses texture sorting and multitexture. In my tests, i've found that it's about the same speed as glquake in low poly scenes (like the original quake levels,) but as you get into the thousands of wpolys, it's faster and faster.

Aguirre's engine *supports* bigger stuff than anything else out there but Fitz is quite fast on the big stuff that doesn't break its limits.

There are some changes to the renderer in QW engines too but they don't help as much in big scenes.

References:
-Marcher release thread http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=28271
-Fitz readme
http://celephais.net/fitzquake/files/fitzquake080.txt 

Fitz is smoother than AGL engines on my machine too, though AGL at least loads the big levels and is really useful if you somehow manage to get a leak that you can't find in the editor or some other problem on a big unoptimised map.

Hopefully the next version of fitz will support bigger maps (and ogg/mp3 playback :) ) 

that Fitz won't go to AGL level limit features, it would encourage sloppy mapping... AGL:s features are mostly for debugging - except for some massive maps too. 

Maybe you are right. Quoth 2 has a lot of features for reducing model useage and if Kinn can fit marcher into less than 32k faces we shouldn't really complain :) 

if the edict and MAX_CHANNELS overflow stuff could be improved it would be nice. 

or maybe someone needs to get a PC that is not 8 years old... 

You mean you guys actually want Fitzquake to be limited to standard Quake's limitations like clipnodes and marksurfaces? 

It's not so much that they want fitzquake to have the limits. It's more about making maps that conform to the limits of every engine, and so it's not a problem that fitzquake doesn't increase them. 

I tend to add too much crap into a map, true, but this sounds odd.

Maintain the ten year old limits so that all Quake maps are pure / well built / not beyond a certain filesize? 

Though when Fitz SDL port works on all platforms, there is less reason for that since everybody could in theory just use it.

If some kind of compromise could be reached where new mappers would still understand the benefits of making the map with lower limits. I don't have any idea how to make it so though.

I have a roughly 6 year old computer and display card btw. :) 

but still being able to run coloured lights.

Darkplaces :-| 

if you eat too much, your vision will get blue. 

surely that's up to the mapper himself if he wants to be a good mapper?

I dont see what that has to do with engines having higher limits. 

since a lot of mappers just don't know, they will use a random client and add stuff to the map until it crashes, then remove slightly. 

you have a big noob map instead of a small noob map. Its still a noob map :)