Those are facts man and sure cube engine developers havent reinvented the wheel. Id Tech´s engine basicly is where it all started with, so cube using same code language pretty much [Edit]: Turns out quake is written pure C* otherwise same renderer (opengl just other version) and its pretty much about the renderer how performance goes. Which renderer choice we got? Whats used everywhere? Directx, OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal and whatever those make the difference and its obviously that OpenGL 0.2 will do alot better as 1.1+ since its not stuffed with additional code for whatever.
And since sadly everyone thinks that good graphics is about lighting and reflection, normals etc you see why it all went to the point of having to buy new hardware every few years for thousands to play actual games. While they didnt understood that its nothing special to create good graphics if you dont care about efficiency. And yes a 4k texture would give a much higher advance in quality while pretty much just eating up more VRAM and most low end devices it doesnt matter due their shared memory, you wont need much higher CPU/GPU frequency´s due that. And compare cube or cube2 with quake/quake2 and tell me how big of a graphic difference those lighting, reflection and all other effects made? It simple feels like same for me. While the hardware difference is unreal. And im talking about empty maps, just the 3D engine itself. Just go and get Unreal Engine 3/4, Unity and whatever engine is out there and make a clean map and compare FPS/Watt performance, thats whats important. If they would do the same in the car industry...we couldnt pay for the fuel anymore.
Anyway at the end you´re right with the point that its not worth it, atleast if you´re not a team. Maybe someone will come across with what you want, may someone already did (AssaultCube Reloaded project) or Tesseract. At the end no render update will make anything better, it just make it worse for those with slow hardware, render downgrade in combination with better models...would like to see that, could look more realistic as seeing a old model reflected somewhere and having to think if thats "me" the player model.
For a better understanding quake 1 is id tech 1, quake 2 id tech 2 engine, after that id tech 3 which been using in call of duty, and the following call of duty games with infinity ward engine is id tech engine at its core, same as cube engine is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_(game_engine)
There you can see what got added each new engine version and then look up system requirements for each game, then we look up the hardware for each engine to play at 60 fps. For the last call of duty Intel Core i5-2500K its 4x3300Mhz together 13200 Mhz IW8.0 engine vs Id tech 2 with 90 MHz now lets see the features we got more is it worth it x146+ times? Pretty much the same is at other hardware aspects, sure lets count in the models and textures which require higher gpu core/vram and ram but did models increase by x146? Not really, did the textures increase by 146? nope. Did the lighting, shaders and other effects increase? yep. What else increased? Power consume by x650+(if you dont count in the architecture optimisations over the years to consume less power, otherwise it would be even higher) and now tell me that those effects are worth the hardware it requires.
And since sadly everyone thinks that good graphics is about lighting and reflection, normals etc you see why it all went to the point of having to buy new hardware every few years for thousands to play actual games. While they didnt understood that its nothing special to create good graphics if you dont care about efficiency. And yes a 4k texture would give a much higher advance in quality while pretty much just eating up more VRAM and most low end devices it doesnt matter due their shared memory, you wont need much higher CPU/GPU frequency´s due that. And compare cube or cube2 with quake/quake2 and tell me how big of a graphic difference those lighting, reflection and all other effects made? It simple feels like same for me. While the hardware difference is unreal. And im talking about empty maps, just the 3D engine itself. Just go and get Unreal Engine 3/4, Unity and whatever engine is out there and make a clean map and compare FPS/Watt performance, thats whats important. If they would do the same in the car industry...we couldnt pay for the fuel anymore.
Anyway at the end you´re right with the point that its not worth it, atleast if you´re not a team. Maybe someone will come across with what you want, may someone already did (AssaultCube Reloaded project) or Tesseract. At the end no render update will make anything better, it just make it worse for those with slow hardware, render downgrade in combination with better models...would like to see that, could look more realistic as seeing a old model reflected somewhere and having to think if thats "me" the player model.
For a better understanding quake 1 is id tech 1, quake 2 id tech 2 engine, after that id tech 3 which been using in call of duty, and the following call of duty games with infinity ward engine is id tech engine at its core, same as cube engine is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_(game_engine)
There you can see what got added each new engine version and then look up system requirements for each game, then we look up the hardware for each engine to play at 60 fps. For the last call of duty Intel Core i5-2500K its 4x3300Mhz together 13200 Mhz IW8.0 engine vs Id tech 2 with 90 MHz now lets see the features we got more is it worth it x146+ times? Pretty much the same is at other hardware aspects, sure lets count in the models and textures which require higher gpu core/vram and ram but did models increase by x146? Not really, did the textures increase by 146? nope. Did the lighting, shaders and other effects increase? yep. What else increased? Power consume by x650+(if you dont count in the architecture optimisations over the years to consume less power, otherwise it would be even higher) and now tell me that those effects are worth the hardware it requires.