Quake 3: Arena is an oldie but a goldie when it comes to gaming benchmarks and its design really shows off some of the advantages of the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 models. Quake 3 is both floating-point intensive and has support for SIMD optimizations (MMX, 3DNow! and SSE), making it a great fit for processor testing. It also happens to scale nicely to faster CPUs, video cards and motherboards, and Quake 3 performance is still used as a barometer for many CPU and 3D video card purchases.
Quake 3 testing is performed using High Quality settings (due to the entry-level nature of the video component), and a 1024x768 resolution, using release 1.30, along with the standard "demo Four".
Quake 3 is a great test of motherboard and memory subsystem performance, as this FPS benchmark scales extremely well to higher performance hardware. In the game section, we're checking out relative performance of the XC Cube EZ65 using different levels of entry-level 3D hardware, and the results are consistent with video card power. Naturally, the Radeon 9600 Pro takes the top spot, though the GeForce 5600 is not that far behind. There is a big drop-off to the Intel Extreme 2 graphics, even compared to a low-end GeForce4 MX440.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a good system benchmark, but we're giving the nod to the updated version: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. This game has made a few revisions to the basic RtCW design, as well as solidifying the features support. The setup is the same as Quake 3, with a 1024x768 resolution, and High quality defaults with in-game detail settings at maximum. We have used a custom demo taken from the Railgun game area, along with plenty of MP participants. This is one tough demo test, so expect the framerates to sink below those of other Quake-based first-person shooters, and give our platforms a much tougher workload.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory may be similar to Quake 3, but its enhanced graphics and features means overall framerates drop quite significantly. This is quite true when testing with entry-level video, and the Radeon 9600 Pro and GeForce FX 5600 are in a close race for top spot, with the GeForce4 MX440 more than doubling that of the Intel Extreme 2 graphics core.
Unreal Tournament 2003 includes a benchmark program that automatically tests in two separate modes. One is Flyby, which takes a canned tour of the UT game world and then offers up a framerate score and really hammers both the CPU and video card. There is also a Botmatch score, but since it we are keeping the video and CPU hardware totally consistent, this test is mostly superfluous for motherboard benchmarking. In this section, we've tested UT 2003 Flyby at 1024x768 x 32-bit.
Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby benchmarking gives us another view of potential performance, and the Radeon 9600 Pro streaks out to a big lead over the GeForce FX 5600. The same thing happens at the lower-end, with the GeForce4 MX440 really taking it to the i865G's integrated graphics.
The Unreal Tournament demo is an upgraded version of the popular UT series, and also includes support for Botchmatch demos. This is the next step for Unreal Tournament graphics and performance, and is another serious test for current hardware. For this benchmark, we've used the UMark GUI interface with the following settings: Colossus map, 12 players and High Image Quality graphics.
The UT 2004 Botmatch results are similar to the previous UT 2003 scores, with the three dedicated AGP cards taking their usual positions. The only real change is the lackluster performance of the i865G integrated graphics, and while some previous games were playable, UT 2004 is not.
