Raspberry Pi Can Now Run Quake 3 On Open Graphics

Just over one month ago Broadcom opened up their VideoCore IV 3D graphics driver stack and now it's been brought to work on the Raspberry Pi low-cost ARM board -- to the extent that it can run Quake III.

At the end of February the VideoCore IV 3D was finally opened up properly by Broadcom and it quickly earned praise by open-source graphics driver developers. A $10,000 USD bounty was also issued for the first developer(s) to get Quake III able to run on a fully-free graphics stack for this cheap but slow ARM single-board computer.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the winner, Simon Hall. Getting the open stack running requires rebuilding the Raspberry Pi's kernel, which allegedly takes about 12 hours on this slow ARMv6 hardware and it's recommended to overclock the Pi for speeding up the process. The latest system firmware is also required. You'll also need a large memory card for handling the kernel compilation process.

Should you want to know more about getting the open-source driver stack up and running on the Raspberry Pi, which for at least right now has no official Mesa/Gallium3D driver, see the RaspberryPi.org announcement.