I remember when Quake III was first released, and back then 17” monitors were the norm, and playing it on a 19” monitor blew my mind away with the Riva TNT2 GPU, as I zipped through The Longest Yard at high resolution without missing a beat. It is then pretty difficult to believe how far computing power has come these days, with an example of Quake III running on a Raspberry Pi spotted in real life – and to think that the Raspberry Pi costs a pittance in comparison to a whole desktop back at the turn of the millenium.
Broadcom and Raspberry Pi offered a $10,000 reward to the first developer who could successfully port Quake III to have it work with the Raspberry Pi and a new graphics driver. Developer Simon Hill was the one who managed to lay claim to that ten grand, although it must be said that one should have a Raspberry Pi that has 512MB RAM alongside an SD memory card which has a minimum of 8GB of storage space.
Hard to believe, right, that a 3D first-person shooter is capable of running on a $35 computer. The Raspberry Pi sports a 700 MHz BCM2835 with VideoCore IV graphics, being a low-power and affordable ARM11 processor. Prior to this, Quake could run on the Raspberry Pi, but one needed to use a closed-source, proprietary graphics driver previously to get that done. We have seen Quake III run on other platforms before, too, such as Android.
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