Quake 2 is much improved from Quake. I average 60 fps without 3d support in Quake, but I barely get 30 fps in Quake2. When I first started the game and looked at the graphics I was amazed. I thought to myself to bad quake didn't look this good. This game should require 3d hardware, but it don't. I know that even on my Pentium 200MMX with 32MB ram and a S3 TRIO64V+ video chip (which has no 3d support), it is to slow for me. Although I still play it becuase it is a great game.
This is for people running on non-Intel Pentium processors The AMD and Cyrix processors will run Quake2 slower than an Intel chip will. The reason for this is pretty technical, but I will explain it anyway. Intel uses a pipelined input into there Pentium processors FPU(Floating Point Unit), enabling the Intel processor to do 2-3 insructions at a time. The AMD and Cyrix processors FPU is not Pipelined there for they are slower. The AMD and Cyrix processor average 1 instruction at a time. Quake2 is FPU dependent so people with non-Intel processors will have slower frame rates even with all of the tweaks in the world for Quake2.