Hands and weapon

Do you want your hand and weapon to be visible when you play?

You will gain a few frames per second if they are invisible.

Particles?

You will have a huge performance increase from disabling particles.

Particles are the small debris your rockets etc. will leave behind after being fired, and the blood that splats from targets..

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Dynamic Lighting?

You will have a large performance increase from disabling dynamic lights.

Dynamic is the lighting your shots create on the area and walls around the projectile.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Shadows

Turning gl shadows on will definitely lower framerates by a large margin. I personally think the shadows are not very helpful and aren't very pleasing to look at.

GL Shadows Enabled:

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GL Shadows Disabled:

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Intensity

Intensity is the overall brightness. I recommend setting this to 2 and gl_modulate to 2.5.

GL_modulate

Increasing this will lighten up the darker areas of the game. I suggest you use the above setting of 2.5 while setting intensity to 2. Then you can just adjust the brightness under options to match specifically what you want.

Player Mip

This is the texture quality that the player models will use. You will gain a little performance by changing it to 2, but you will gain image quality by leaving this at 0. If you have a voodoo2, lowering this will not affect framerates at all most likely

Pic Mip

This is the overall texture quality. You will gain a little performance by changing it to 2, but you will lose massive image quality. If you have a voodoo2, leave this at 0. If you want image quality, then leave this at 0 with any card.

8 Bit textures?

You will not lose much from them visually, but may gain some performance by enabling them. For best image quality, don't use 8 bit textures.

ZTrick?

Enabling this will cause flickering of textures and skins, but may increase FPS quite a bit. I suggest you leave this value alone with any card except 3Dfx cards. 3Dfx cards don't tend to flicker as bad.

Flash Blend?

Enabling this will increase frame rates but create an ugly circular light around each object fired. I find it annoying so I recommend leaving this one alone.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Palette shifting?

Palette shifting will make it so when you get shot or use quad damage or anything similar the screen will change colors. You may gain a few FPS with this disabled.

Texture Mode

Find which mode your card supports and select it for best results. Voodoo2 users may select Linear interpolation for trilinear hardware.

Joystick?

Most people find it easier to not use a joystick when playing Quake 2. This will also increase performance.

OpenGL culling

Culling removes objects that are covered. So if you disable it the objects will not be removed, so if there is cracking in polygons they may not show. However the game will take a big performance hit.

"Round Down"

Lowers texture resolution of some textures. Uses less memory so performance is gained. Voodoo2 12 meg owners may skip this one.

Sky Mip

Enabling Sky Mipmaps may cause the sky to be blurry and could possibly increase performance.

Sound Compatibility

Do you have an Creative Labs Ensoniq AudioPCI card or a Sound Blaster PCI64? If you have one of these or your sound card stutters make sure you set sound to compatible mode. Otherwise set to Max Performance for best sound and performance.

Sound

Do you want low quality sound? Lowering sound quality will lead to much better performance. The sound is still good, but it will not take all your ram and CPU just to work around it. 8 Bit 11 kHz sound is recommended.

CD Audio

Do you like listening to Audio CDs or the Quake 2 music when playing? You will have much smoother performance with CD Audio disabled.

Hear your own footsteps?

If when playing Quake 2 you don't wish to hear your own footsteps (it makes things confusing sometimes) you can disable this.

Internet play

What speed is your modem or connection for multiplayer games?
33.6 k or slower
56 k
112 k to 1.5 Mb/sec
1.5 Mb/sec+ or LAN