Thank you for your interest in Q3Bench.

This has been a complicated project that has taken countless hours to design and validate. We are very excited about this utility because it literally turns hours of work into minutes. This program is 100% freeware, and our only goal was to provide you (the user) with a valuable tool. We hope you enjoy it and find it beneficial.

Note. this tool is developed by the G256 staff, we are hosting it for them.

Q3Bench is a program that automatically benchmarks Quake3 Arena by using customized configuration files and scripts generated from the selections you make. It then starts Quake3 while it exits. When Quake3 is finished running the benchmarks, it will exit and you simply need to launch Q3Bench again to generate the results. It will gather these results from the console dumps Quake3 was instructed to generate. The results will be written into a easily readable and formatted text file. If multiple runs at each setting were selected (as recommended), averaged results will be computed and added to the report file for you!

Q3Bench does not affect Quake3 benchmarking results as it is not actually running at the same time as Quake3. When run, Q3Bench will set up the configuration files and scripts to automatically run Quake3. These scripts are nothing more than (somewhat complicated) Quake3 commands written into multiple configuration files. Q3Bench will then exit as it starts Quake3. You'll know when the benchmarking runs are complete, because the last instruction in the script files is for Quake3 to exit (quit).

Q3Bench will run and compile the results of up to three runs per setting. As you might know, Frames Per Second (FPS) results from Quake3 can vary up to (and sometimes over) 3 frames per second at the same settings. By running each setting level two or three times, the average FPS result will show a much more accurate representation of true performance.

A full run with all three configuration file settings and all five of the standard resolution levels use to take hours to do by hand. But, now you can just fire up Q3Bench and go watch some TV. Come back in a little while and run Q3Bench again to display the results. Hours of work is now only a couple of minutes out of your life! Everyone that has tested Q3Bench so far and has previously done full sets of Quake3 benchmarks by hand has been given us great feedback.

Q3Bench only works with Windows and there are no plans for a linux version. If anyone wants to make a linux version they are welcome to any help we can give them, as long as they use the same name, faq and menu system. (we don't want to have to answer questions on an unfamiliar program we can't run!)