Quake III Arena
Overview | Review | Images | Downloads
While nominally the sequel to 1997's Quake II, Quake III Arena took the series in a new direction by omitting the single player campaign and focusing entirely on multiplayer action. The software renderer included with previous Quake games was also dropped to make room for a vastly improved OpenGL renderer. While Quake III Arena is playable on the majority of Windows 98 systems, it requires a GeForce256-class video card and a fast Pentium III or Athlon CPU to run smoothly.
Quake III Arena's high system requirements and reliable built-in timedemo utility made it a popular benchmark of the early 2000s. Its engine was also licensed for use in many other first person shooters, and was still in use as late as 2005: Call of Duty 2 uses a heavily-modified Quake III engine. As with its predecessors, Quake III's source code was released under the GPL in 2005. However, because Quake III suffers from few compatibility problems on newer versions of Windows, source ports have focused on porting the game to new platforms. Patch 1.32 is recommended for best results on all systems.
Like most id Software games, Quake III Arena has a developer console accessed with the tilde key (~). A few important console commands are listed below.
A full list of console commands is available here.
Quake III Arena's high system requirements and reliable built-in timedemo utility made it a popular benchmark of the early 2000s. Its engine was also licensed for use in many other first person shooters, and was still in use as late as 2005: Call of Duty 2 uses a heavily-modified Quake III engine. As with its predecessors, Quake III's source code was released under the GPL in 2005. However, because Quake III suffers from few compatibility problems on newer versions of Windows, source ports have focused on porting the game to new platforms. Patch 1.32 is recommended for best results on all systems.
Like most id Software games, Quake III Arena has a developer console accessed with the tilde key (~). A few important console commands are listed below.
- cg_drawFPS 1 - enables on-screen frame rate counter
- r_ext_compressed_textures 1 - enables DXT1 texture compression (lower quality, higher performance)
- timedemo 1 - activates timedemo mode
- demo four - plays a short demo and returns the average frame rate
A full list of console commands is available here.