Alexey Yudichev

Guys from Bytonic have created a java port of open-sourced quake2 engine. It is using standard Java3D API and two different implementations of Java3D based on OpenGL. So apart from OpenGL the engine is all pure java. Although they have a benchmark page, I was interested to test it myself. So I downloaded jake2 (this is how the port is called) and original q2 demo version. I used q2demo1.dm2 to measure fps. I left all the settings at their default values except the resolution which I set to 1024×768, full screen. jake2 showed 212 fps, original C version resulted in 191 fps. The only thing that was unfair is that jake2 was based on quake2 3.21 sources and original demo I used was version 3.14.

I had a glance at the java sources too. Naturally, they don’t look like proper java sources but more like not very object oriented C sources. At the end of the day, this is a port from conceptually different language, not an original application.

The conclusion is whoever challenges the performance of modern JVMs is welcome to give jake2 a try and eat dirt