[stormy]

In the tests that I’ve run, the results haven’t been capped at either 30 or 60 FPS, so the performance reflected should be the correct.

The IR4 setup achieves more than 60 FPS when running the standard levels. (The first level) The time demo seems to be built the stress the graphics systems more, hence the lower frame rates reflected in the results.

Last night I ran the same test with the same settings on my Alienware equipped with a Quadro Plex 1000 model IV, and it achieved a result of 110.3 FPS. (This system was released in 2006!)

It doesn't really work the way that you are thinking. By default IRIX synchronises the FPS to half of your monitor refresh rate (In my experience) So you will find when running a 60hz monitor, when the scene is extremely simple (ie; load the map test_bigbox which places you inside a simple box, just type test_bigbox in the quake 3 console) You will see 30fps (as long as you have a fairly decent system) If you are running 120hz monitor, you should see 60fps (again, with a decent system)

A quirk of this is that if the system cannot maintain 60fps, it will drop down to 30fps. If it cannot maintain 30fps, it drops to 15fps.

for the timedemo (FYI the quake engine doesn't enable/disable vsync or anything on the OS side) take for instance a system running a 60hz monitor. This means the maximum FPS it can ever achieve is 30fps. So during the 'demo playback' it will fluctuate between 30fps, 15fps and 7fps. Your result will be the mean average of those.

If you correctly disable swap-buffering, it removes this monitor-dependant-hardlock. So if your machine cannot do 60fps, but can manage 47fps, it will output 47fps (and everything inbetween)

Hope this makes sense.