Quake 3 runs on Android smoothly

Who would’ve thought that the processing power of smartphones have finally caught up far enough 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 over 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 time 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++ code 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 modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. 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 because 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 time 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.