Related link: http://www.bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html

Jake2, a Java port of Quake2 is pretty cool. More than anything, however, it provides this interesting table:

This is a great show of 3D prowess. Things like this, as well as the Narya 2D open source engine from ThreeRings really are starting to at least show Java can serve as a first-class gaming platform. More than that, just having seen all the… *cough* horrible code in games before, having things like Java’s threading model, network and database support might really make it a BETTER platform for a lot of forthcoming games than C.

The other thing I find interesting, as an aside, in the games industry is the divergence of “Graphics” and “Non-graphics”. WoW is a really great game, for example, that in terms of the industry has almost primitive graphics. However, stylization and “art” factors in to make the downright 1996 polycount look absolutely great, even on older computers. It could simply be that somewhere in the neighborhood of Q2’s polycount is all a lot of games really need. Of course, adding all the great new card features — bumpmapping, lighting, etc — really drive up the visual satisfaction you get out of those lower counts. More importantly, it keeps the generation of art assets in the range that (a) the open source project can put out something that looks nice and (b) the smaller game shop doesn’t need a team of thousands doing modelling.