Quake III Arena (vkQuake3)

Game: Quake III Arena → (Windows, 1999)

vkQuake3: ioquake3, the port that carries on the Quake III Arena source code id Software released in 2005, with an added Vulkan renderer. That renderer comes from Quake-III-Arena-Kenny-Edition, converted from C++ to C so it builds inside ioquake3, and sits alongside ioquake3’s two OpenGL renderers: you enable it from the console with cl_renderer vulkan, and vkinfo shows which graphics card and Vulkan version are in use. It emulates the original’s fixed-function OpenGL pipeline with shaders, draws shadows with the stencil buffer, and applies brightness before uploading textures to the GPU instead of changing the gamma of the whole desktop. It keeps what ioquake3 brings, such as OpenAL sound, voice chat, demo video capture, and HTTP downloads. Its only release is a preview for 64-bit Windows (0.0.1, March 23, 2019) that its author describes as a just-for-fun version that may have bugs; since 2024 it has received fixes from other contributors, such as no longer requiring certain optional Vulkan features, a validation error on Wayland, and C23 compatibility, the latest in June. The same author also has vkOpenArena, the OpenArena version.

You needThe .pk3 files from your own copy of Quake III Arena, which go in the baseq3 folder. Plus a graphics card with Vulkan (or OpenGL, for the other renderers) and Windows, Linux, or macOS (with MoltenVK); apart from the Windows preview, you have to build it.

How it gets to PC

Port of the released source code

Console

Microsoft Windows

Original studio

id Software

Year

1999

Author

Sui Jingfeng

Stars

113

Last activity

2026-06-14 · 4 months ago

License

GPL-2.0

Language

C

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