A small follow-up to v2.5.0: the sawtooth (PowerMac3,1 — 500 MHz G4, GeForce2 MX) was the last machine still on the blob-shadow fallback. Benched on the real hardware, it can afford the crisp stencil shadows after all.
sawtooth A/B (GeForce2 MX, 500 MHz)
| stencil OFF | stencil ON | |
|---|---|---|
| demo1 | 74 fps | 60 fps (~19% cost) |
| demo2 | — | 68 fps |
Both stay well above the 40 fps G4 floor, and the shadow renders crisp (screenshot-verified — enemy models get a clean dark drop-shadow). The old "GeForce2 MX is too CPU-bound, stencil would drop it below the floor" assumption predated the AltiVec optimisations and the older 60 fps floor — no longer true.
Every machine in the fleet now renders crisp projected stencil shadows — G3 (where enabled), all three G4s (mini-g4, quicksilver, sawtooth), the G5, and both Intel boxes.
This is a config-only change on the v2.5.0 engine. All the v2.5.0 features (per-weapon blast marks on walls, the player-models deploy fix) are unchanged — see the v2.5.0 release for those.
Install
- Copy everything from the DMG into a folder (e.g.
~/Desktop/quake2/) - Copy your retail
pak0.pak,pak1.pak,pak2.pakand theplayers/folder intobaseq2/ - Double-click
Quake2.app
Runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther (G3) and newer.