You guys are right.. That 500FPS was with the Mesa GL libraries only. After installing the nVidia kernel module and GLX software gears ran:
10617 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2123.400 FPS
10952 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2190.400 FPS
10944 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2188.800 FPS
10953 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2190.600 FPS
10949 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2189.800 FPS
10924 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2184.800 FPS
10794 frames in 5.000 seconds = 2158.800 FPS
Duh! Still less than half of Karma's... Is that all I'm going to get (not that I'm complaining, it seems awesome in Q3 running at 1280x1024 with full detail and graphics settings at their highest)?
Of course when I did this test I also had a lot of unrelated stuff going on like a VMware session open running a copy of Win98, and have a boatload more background stuff running than you would have running on a home XP machine (PostgreSQL server, Apache, etc, etc, etc). And Quake III still runs perfectly! I don't believe if I shut all that stuff down that my FPS test would increase all that much so maybe there is some more I can do?
And Karma, you are right. I ran "quake3 +set cg_drawfps 1" and it showed the framerate in Q3. In 1280x1024 and all options set to highest level it seems to average around 90FPS but I would see it jump up to about 180FPS periodically. Is that about right?
[ February 10, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]