Quake 3 Arena PAL vs NTSC-U framerate difference?

[Tarnish]

I tried to find info about this online but ended up empty handed, so I'll ask here:

Is there any performance difference between the PAL and NTSC-U releases of Quake 3 Arena?

I'm asking because so far I was playing a burnt copy which was of the NTSC-U version, and now that got an official PAL version it seems to me that the PAL vesion runs smoother with a higher average framerate. But since the NTSC-U version is a burnt one I don't know if it's because of that or was the NTSC-U release like that to begin with.

And just to clarify, I'm talking about offline single-player, not online.

[Anonymouse]

Ive noticed that poorly copied CDRs (badly ordered ISOs) can have popup issues. Ive noticed this when playing a copy of Crazy Taxi. Maybe this could be related?

[Amorist89]

If true, then the faster frame rates doesn't help from getting my backside constantly handed to in single player.

I'm on medium and it's still pure evil.

Back on topic lol, I'd confidently presume there's no different with region, as anynomouse said; a copy version could be flawed.

I do recall reading that this game peaks at 60 FPS and dropping occasionally down to 40 FPS.

[Mechanic]

I must disagree with 60fps. I believe at best 40fps but usually at 30. To compare... Play the pc version at 60fps by setting com_maxfps to 60 then play the dreamcast version. You will see a dramatic difference.

[Tarnish]

Ive noticed that poorly copied CDRs (badly ordered ISOs) can have popup issues. Ive noticed this when playing a copy of Crazy Taxi. Maybe this could be related?

The thought had crossed my mind too, but I kinda doubt it's due to badly optimized CD image. In the case of Crazy Taxi, as far as I know, data is almost constantly being read from the disc every time the player moves to a new area of the city, since the map is too big to fit into memory in its entirety. That's why there's popup if the copied image isn't optimized well enough since the system can't seek and read it fast enough.

But with Quake, I don't think data is constantly being read from the disc, I think it loads the map and the character models once into memory and then it only reads/streams the music from the disc (I could be wrong but that seems logical to me). So I think even if the CD image was poorly optimized, once it loads the map and characters into the memory, it shouldn't affect the performance of the game. And since there's no problem (skipping or stuttering) streaming the music from the burnt disc, the maps are loaded pretty much as fast as from the GD-rom and the GD-drive doesn't sound like it has to seek a lot to load the game, I doubt it's a badly optimized image.

[Tarnish]

Then again, I recall my burnt copy of Ready 2 Rumble and NHL 2K (or 2K2) ran choppy as well, and those had nothing to stream but music/voice clips from the disc as well..so who knows.

[Wombat]

By design the Dreamcast reads CD's at 6x speed as where GD-ROMs are being read at 12x speed. This is probably the reason for the performance difference.