NVIDIA Engineer Writes Vulkan Driver That Runs Quake III On Old Raspberry Pi Boards

An NVIDIA engineer by the name of Martin Thomas recently gained some spare time away from his work schedule. To that end, he decided to do something that, clearly no one asked for: created a Vulkan-based driver for several, older Raspberry Pi tinker boards.

The elaborate, Thomas had taken a Raspberry Pi 3B+ board and wrote a low-level Vulkan-based RPi-VK-Driver for the platform. In this case, he wrote the driver so that it would be able to run id Software’s Quake 3 on the Raspberry Pi.

VkQuake3 running at 100+ FPS on a @Raspberry_Pi 3B+ using the new low level RPi-VK-Driver pic.twitter.com/UhhYgQrAEi

— Martin Thomas (@0martint) June 19, 2020

The end result is simply quite astonishing and somewhat remarkable. As you can see in the embedded tweet above, Thomas was able to not just get Quake 3 running on the tinker board; he also managed to get it running smoothly, with framerates as high as 100 fps.

On that note, if you’re a avid Raspberry Pi tinker enthusiast, you can download the corresponding RPi-VK-Driver v1.0 directly from GitHub. Do note that if the boot mode for the board is set to “Desktop”, you will be required to switch to the tty console mode in order for the modesetting to work. Also, do note that the Raspberry Pi 3B+ board isn’t the latest product from the brand. That honour belongs to the Raspberry Pi 4 B.

(Source: Phoronix, Hot Hardware, GitHub [1] [2])

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