Quake 3 runs on Android smoothly

Who would’ve thought that the processing capability of smartphones have finally caught up far adequate to run an intense game like Quake 3 (back in its day, anyways) smoothly? Check out what the programmer had to say about his efforts of porting Quake 3 by to the Android platform.

“Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More moment was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. ‘Normally when you compile C/C++ cipher using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports contemporary CPUs and

Neon SIMD directions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big considering the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.”

Well, with Quake Live readily available for some duration already, we aren’t surprised any more that Quake 3 can run on an Android-powered smartphone pretty smoothly, although it will never fully reproduce the adrenaline pumping moments as experienced on an actual computer.

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Orginal post by Mike