By volt - April 12, 2003

Quake3: Performance

What would an article be without Quake III benchmarks? This game has become the king of all benchmarks. Yes, the technology is getting old but there are still handful of people playing it. Why do we still play it? Well face it, it's a great dynamic LAN / Internet based game. With current graphics cards we can finally enjoy all the eye-candy. Doesn't matter if you enable Level 4 of Antialiasing along with 8AF at 1280x1024, it will still play at around 50 FPS. Maybe it doesn't take advantage of our card's latest technology innovations, but sure looks good! Okay, enough of my braggin'..

You will notice that in most benchmarks the P4 system always wins (not by much those, it's almost on par with the Ti4200). Why? Well the CPU is clocked at 2.39GHz and has my lovely Ti4600 in it, so it's not apples-to-apples type comparison (based on CPU). Never the less, our GeForce PowerPack! Ultra/650-8X XP performed fabulously. Let's take a look.

P4: 1.6A @ 2.39GHz / 512MB PC2100 / Stock Gainward Ti4600
AMD: Athlon XP 1900+ @ 1.6GHz / 512MB PC2100 / Stock Gainward Ti4200

Our AMD box performed quite well at 1024x768 and beat the P4 by 1 FPS in the first benchmark. Yay! :) Even in Quake 3, applying some Image Enhancing techniques will decrease the performance no matter what. The second comparison was pretty much neck to neck. Pretty much across all benchmarks AMD loses to P4 at 800x600 resolution. But who plays at that anyway? Surprisingly in Quincunx mode the NV28 beat the NV25 by around 10 FPS. Not by much but it did! Quincunx (in terms of quality) has improved so much since the official Detonator 21.81 version. Again, at 1024x768 (last two benchmarks) our test card performs head to head against the Ti4600 at higher clock speeds.

What more do you need to know?. The performance was great with the Ti4200, even with high AA and AF modes. It is on par with the Ti4600 at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 while Antialiasing / Anisotropic Filtering was enabled. We were very happy to see how it performed at those particular resolutions. That's why those are our two recommended modes. Apply some 4AA / 4AF and go kick some butt.