Quake

quake is a very easy game to benchmark, containing both a timedemo function and an in-game console that makes it easy to use the timedemo function. for testing, i use a pair of different demos. first is demo1, which is included with every copy of quake and provides a simple baseline that should work reasonably well on most systems. the second is bigass1, a multiplayer demo i dug up that used to be popular for stress-testing quake. it's very much a worst case scenario, featuring a full multiplayer game and lots of action. i also have a demo for quakeworld, but i haven't had much success running quakeworld on the machines i've tried it with. i test using both software quake and glquake, as well as rave quake on old macs. tests are run at maximum settings, with the resolution set to 1024x768, or 800x600 on machines with integral displays that can't hit 10x7.