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Raspberry Pi Running Quake 3
First time accepted submitter phonewebcam writes "Here's something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We're still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, there seems to be a library issue which means our framerate, while good, isn't quite as spectacular as we know it can be; we're working on it as I post this) – but this is what test boards are for, and we're making great progress getting the boards running smoothly."
And people barely notice. This computer is as powerful than anything I had 10 years ago. It can do almost anything you could need - and what it can't do is mostly down to bloated software. Sometimes I have a hard time shaking off the feeling that we've almost stood still for the last decade - but then again, that's a good thing, because it allows the rest of the world to catch up to the high-income countries, by benefiting from ever lower prices.
The real question, as after any dream that has become true, is: what's next? And I have no idea.
This thing isn't meant for playing "games of today". It's just a nice deminstration of the power of this incredibly cheap device. They were only getting about 20fps (albeit in 1080p) in the video, but it's still cool as a hobbyist project.
which is totally what she said
That's certainly our thinking. You can see what we're doing here as a first stab at redefining the price point and set of tradeoffs for an entry-level desktop PC. It's not perfect (the ARM11 in particular is only just good enough), but I suspect in ten years' time we'll be looking back wondering why we used to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a system unit for a machine to surf the web and run office software.