Not so fast

I wrote a custom engine to render Quake levels with my GPGPU. After fixing many subtle hardware lockups and compiler backend gremlins, I'm right chuffed to see this running reliably on an FPGA. It stresses a lot of functionality: hardware multithreading, heavy floating point math, and complex data structure accesses.

I won't be challenging anyone to a deathmatch any time soon

But... it's running at around 1 frame per second. While this is only a single core running at 50 Mhz, the original Quake with a software renderer ran fine on a 75 Mhz Pentium, so there's a lot of room for improvement. I'll dig more into the performance in a bit, but first, some background on how this works.