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Performance

The following comments not only apply to glTron, but to many 3D games as well.

I'm assuming that you have installed the latest OpenGL drivers for your graphics card.

So, glTron doesn't run fast enough on your computer. Here's why:

In concurrent 3D games, there are two bottlenecks that reduce the speed at which your game is running. One is you CPU (which performs all the geometry functions, 3D transformation, etc.), the other is your graphics card (which has the job to draw the triangles on the screen). Update: On modern cards (Geforce 256, Radeon 7000 and newer) the Graphics card performs most of the geomtry functions as well. Still, you can overtax your CPU easily, since it also has the job to keep your gfx card busy with geometry data.

Geometry. If you have a slow CPU, the game is probably geometry limited. I.e. the CPU cannot transform & light all the triangles fast enough, and your graphics card is idling.
Fill rate. If you have a fast CPU, but a slow graphics card, then you hit the fill-rate limit of your graphics card. That means, that your card cannot draw all those triangles fast enough, and your CPU is waiting.

How to speed things up

Obviously, it's important to find out if you're fill limited or geometry limited.

Reduce geometry

In glTron, you do the following:

Go to Video->Display Options->Other Details.
Set the 'LOD Settings' entry to 'lower' or 'ugly'.
During the game, press F1 to switch to Single Player view.
In the Audio menu, turn off the music. Sound can put quite a strain on weaker CPUs.

As you can see from the triangle counter in the upper right of the screen, the triangle count has been greatly reduced. Did this speed up your game significantly? No? Then look at the following

Reduce fill rate

Go to the Video->Change Resolution. Lower the resolution.
Go to Video->Display Options->Texture Details. Turn off the floor texture & wall texture & mipmaps

You should now have a playable framereate even on older machines. If you really need to speed up things a bit more (especially if your graphics card doesn't support OpenGL acceleration):

Go to Video->Display Options->Other details.
Turn 'use alpha trails' ON, but disable 'alpha blending'.

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