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.
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.
