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First of all, Quake III was released in 1999 - that's way after the low-latency days already.

Secondly, not every PC in 1999 was capable of even running QIII (let alone at a high frame rate).

During the days of true low-latency gaming, actual game frame rates were in the low 20s and even consoles rarely achieved 50 or 60 fps.

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The link was to an OSP Tourney Q3A mod playing Clan Arena mode, which was released later and became popular even later with better hardware available (another competitive mod was CPMA). You are right on one thing though, default configuration was in 20s of fps on a typical machine of the time and was in fact unplayable, so people had to configure game graphics to simplify it a lot to get high enough framerate, it was basically doom-like looking graphics, no effects, no textures, no shadows, etc.

If a game was playable at 20s of fps, I don't think it deserves a title of low-latency gaming.

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