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Written by Tuan "Solace" Nguyen
Saturday, December 09, 2000
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Page 7 of 8
Quake 3 Arena with 1.25y Point Release
Just like we predicted above with 3DMark2000, the Pentium owns in Quake 3. We’ve come to believe that it will be the performance leader in OpenGL based games – you Counter Strike players should definitely get a kick out of playing it at 1920x1440. That’s what I play it at!
Here we see that Intel stays a full 43.3 FPS faster than AMD in 1024x768. This is the most common resolution Quake 3 players play at. With the Pentium 4 however, feel free to scale resolutions. 1600x1200 becomes a solid resolution with the Pentium 4. I know a lot of players feel a need for high frame rates even though some can even stand 30 FPS. 96.1 FPS at that high of a resolution is outstanding. If you’re a Quake 3 freak, nothing compares to the Pentium 4. Other 3D games should benefit just like Quake 3 days, and it’s one of the more demanding games out there so other games should be fine.
Let’s take a look at High Quality.
In High Quality mode, the Pentium 4’s lead reduces down but it still performs faster than the Athlon. Keep in mind though that the Athlon is clocked 400MHz slower. The double pumped floating point unit in the Pentium 4 really helps it pull ahead from the Athlon and when Intel speeds up the core, things should begin to change in favor of the Pentium 4. There’s no doubt about it; the Pentium 4 definitely has high-speed gaming in mind.
Let’s check out Unreal Tournament since its performance is heavily dependant on the CPU. Unreal Tournament 4.32
Unreal Tournament is really a test of CPU speed. It's very limited by CPU and therefore doesn't quite show frame rates that are quite as high as Quake 3. Let's take a look.
I want to make a point here. You might be thinking, “Why doesn’t the Pentium 4 beat the crap out of the Athlon?” There is one simple explanation. You have to keep in mind that the Pentium 4 is Intel’s first 7th generation processor. AMD’s Athlon is also 7th generation so we expect them to perform similar to each other. With successive speed increases, we should also see frame rates rising to 80 and higher. Also, once again, UT's D3D performance is still limited by the fact that the engine was designed for Glide.
The same story holds true here and it shows that UT isn’t all that graphics-intensive since going from 16-bit to 32-bit didn’t do much to drop the score. Differences stayed between 3FPS and 4FPS. Again, the Athlon lags behind a bit from the lack of MHz speeds.
The Pentium 4 has great potential and I can’t wait to see the outcome of more SSE2 enhanced software. Also, it will be interesting to see games and applications take advantage of the Pentium 4’s quad floating point, double precision abilities. Pretty technical, huh?
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