Tuesday, May 7, 2002

JKII 1.03 Patch Impressions -- 10:23 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've messed around with the Jedi Knight II 1.03 patch a little this morning. One key thing I noticed is that the timedemo command is no longer cheat-protected. There is even a new demo to try. Since EAX 3.0 was added with the patch, I wanted to see what effect it would have on framerates. Technically my SB Live! does not support EAX 3.0, only the SB Audigy and Extigy do. At 1024x768x32 with all the graphic options cranked, I got 90.7 fps without EAX and 76.7 with EAX. The effects sound pretty good, but I'm not sure they are worth a 15% framerate hit. Hopefully someone will come out with a Crusher-esque demo so we can REALLY test our systems.

One thing I noticed when running the timedemos is that JKII is not as repeatable as Quake III is. Without EAX I recorded scores of 91.3, 90.0, 90.4, and 91.0 fps. With EAX I got 77.7, 76.5, 76.1, and 76.6. They are all within a couple of percentage points which is good enough for government work, but I wonder if the hardware sites are going to want to use JKII to replace Q3A because of this.

The Master comments: I'm going to take a guess here and say the varying frame rates are probably the results of the effects engine. If I remember correctly (wow! Iron Chef!) Heretic 2 had a variable effects engine that could affect framerates from each run of a demo as well.

News for 05/07/2002

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