Martin Thomas is an NVIDIA engineer, and he has concocted something very cool that fans of retro games and tiny single board PCs will really appreciate. He has taken an inexpensiveĀ Raspberry PiĀ 3B+ and transformed it into a machine that is capable of running a version of Quake3 at over 100 fps. To get the game to run at that frame rate on the basic Pi hardware, Thomas created a new low-levelĀ Vulkan-based RPi-VK-Driver for the RPi platform and used it to power VkQuake3 on the Raspberry Pi.
Quake 3 fans and Raspberry Pi tinkerers who want to build a machine to run the game themselves can do so since the driver used is publicly available on GitHub. The RPi-VK-Driver v1.0 can now also beĀ downloaded directly from GitHubĀ and installed using the steps below:
- RunĀ install.shĀ in the rpi-vk-driver folder
- RunĀ install.shĀ (as root) in the Vulkan-Loader folder
- Run raspi-config (as root) 3a) Set GL driver to Full KMS 3b) set memory split to 128 (optional) 3c) set boot mode to the console (optional, but preferred)
The driver instructions do note that if the boot mode is set to Desktop, users will need to switch tty console for modesetting to work using ctrl+alt+f1. If that step isn't taken, the system won't allow users to do display modesetting, returning to the Desktop is achieved using ctrl+alt+f7.
The vkQuake3 v1.0 software to runĀ Quake 3Ā on the Raspberry Pi hardware can beĀ downloaded from GitHubĀ as well. Those wanting to build their own Pi Quake rig will need to own Quake III Arena, which can be purchased atĀ Steam for $14.99. Some of the game files have to be copied from theĀ SteamĀ installation to run the game.
TheĀ Raspberry PiĀ 3+ used for this project isn't the latest version of the Pi on the market. In May, theĀ Raspberry Pi 4 debuted with 8 GB of RAMĀ slotting in the line along with the 2 GB and 4 GB existing options. A 64-bit Raspbian OS beta launched at the same time to take advantage of the extra RAM.
Source: NVIDIA Engineer Releases Vulkan Driver For Raspberry Pi That Runs Quake 3 At Over 100 FPS
