Taking a look at the makefile for darkplaces it looks as if the engine is built with -march=i686. I seem to remember from Nexuiz days that it was i686 with MMX that was a minimum so I assume this is the same.
What I am suggesting is change the -march flag to 'pentium3'. This will add SSE into the mix which from benchmarks I did under Nexuiz back in the day would give around 1-2% performance improvement.
It would mean that minimum requirements would exclude more systems. Pentium II systems (all the way up to a dizzying 450MHz) would no longer be able to run the game. AMD side things are worse as it was only in the Athlon XP that SSE was supported, hence a 1.4GHz Athlon would also be out of bounds.
Some Via processors would also be cut off but they would be substantially below spec.
It's only a small performance boost for x86 users but would help everyone not running a Pentium II, early Celeron, classic Athlon, K6, etc. As for those systems that would no longer be usable at all, my testing with a dual 1GHz P3 has shown that gameplay is seriously CPU limited regardless of graphics card so unless someone really does happen to have a 1.4GHz Athlon fitted with a 6800 Ultra or similar AGP card, they're not going to be running this game anyway.
Doesn't mean it can't be recompiled for earlier processor support - Slackware makes Xonotic available for i486:
http://darkstar.ist.utl.pt/slackware/add...SlackBuild
Thought I'd just put this idea out there and see if anyone else sees any mileage in it.
What I am suggesting is change the -march flag to 'pentium3'. This will add SSE into the mix which from benchmarks I did under Nexuiz back in the day would give around 1-2% performance improvement.
It would mean that minimum requirements would exclude more systems. Pentium II systems (all the way up to a dizzying 450MHz) would no longer be able to run the game. AMD side things are worse as it was only in the Athlon XP that SSE was supported, hence a 1.4GHz Athlon would also be out of bounds.
Some Via processors would also be cut off but they would be substantially below spec.
It's only a small performance boost for x86 users but would help everyone not running a Pentium II, early Celeron, classic Athlon, K6, etc. As for those systems that would no longer be usable at all, my testing with a dual 1GHz P3 has shown that gameplay is seriously CPU limited regardless of graphics card so unless someone really does happen to have a 1.4GHz Athlon fitted with a 6800 Ultra or similar AGP card, they're not going to be running this game anyway.
Doesn't mean it can't be recompiled for earlier processor support - Slackware makes Xonotic available for i486:
http://darkstar.ist.utl.pt/slackware/add...SlackBuild
Thought I'd just put this idea out there and see if anyone else sees any mileage in it.
I'm at least a reasonably tolerable person to be around - Narcopic
