CPU Reviews & Articles

Quake 3 Arena

Quake 3: Arena is our primary gaming benchmark here at SE and its design really shows off some of the advantages of the Pentium 4 and Athlon XP. 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 be an extremely popular game and Quake 3 performance is often used as the barometer for many CPU and 3D video card purchases.

Quake 3 testing is performed using Normal (16-bit), High Quality and MAX graphic settings. Normal is the basic Quake 3 option (set at 16-bit color/textures), High Quality is at Default settings, and MAX uses the standard High Quality setting and increases the detail levels a bit. Quake 3 testing has also been updated to release 1.30, along with a natural progression to the standard "demo Four".

Although AMD has made up some ground, the Pentium 4/i580 combo still rules the Quake 3 roost. This is old news, but more importantly the Pentium 4-2.4 GHz allows the i845D to overtake the Athlon XP in a pure DDR comparison.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Performance

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is a great sequel in the popular franchise and the benchmark portion is even better than the original. This new game not only puts the pressure on processors and 3D cards (especially at higher resolutions) but provides some excellent in-game demos in wide open spaces with tons of enemies. For our specific tests, we have used the in-game Elephant demo to determine potential framerates, using both 16 and 32-bit modes.

In a pure comparison, the winner is almost too close to call. The Athlon XP 2100+ wins out at 16-bit, while the Pentium 4-2.4 GHz takes the crown at 32-bit testing. In each case the margin of victory is incredibly small and almost not worth mentioning. Then again, Serious Sam 2 is an area that the Athlon XP has long excelled, so this tie could be termed a win of sorts for Intel.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein Performance

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is another Quake engine game, but with some notable differences. The basic game engine may be the same, but the graphics, gameplay and stress it puts on a processor are very different. Until the next Quake game appears, RtCW is the next best way to determine high-end Quake engine performance. We have used the Checkpoint MP demo using the default Normal (16-bit) and High Quality settings.

In this area we see a couple of trends emerging. The Pentium 4-2.4 GHz wins in both Normal and HQ testing, but when looking at the numbers a bit closer we see a slightly different story. The Pentium 4 is a clear winner using Normal detail settings, but at High Quality, the Athlon XP closes the gap quite handily. The turnabout is most noticeable when comparing the DDR scores of both processors between the two charts.