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 Arena has always been dominated by the Pentium 4 line of processors, and this is still the case with the Celeron 2.0 and 3.0 GHz results. The Celeron still places well against the Athlon XP processors, showing its Pentium 4 lineage quite clearly.
Jedi Knight is the newest Quake 3-based game and many would say it is the most resource-hungry. In fact, it's been nicknamed the "best reason to own a GeForce4 Ti" and supplies us with another excellent way of measuring high-end gaming performance. In this particular instance, the processors have been tested using standard High Quality detail settings with the resolution increased to 1024x768.
The Celeron at default 2.0 GHz and overclocked 3.0 GHz speeds is able to fare a little better in Jedi Knight II than our two lower-end Athlon XP chips. At 2.0 GHz, the Celeron is able to beat our 1900+ value chip by about 5fps, and this gap gets bigger at 3.0 GHz.
The Comanche 4 benchmark from Novalogic gives us an opportunity to use an actual flight sim for performance testing. Flight sims are notorious for their CPU-dependence, and this makes the Comanche 4 benchmark potentially a better CPU test than it is for 3D video cards. The reliance on the CPU shows itself off in the benchmark, and even the slightest difference in framerates could pay off in significantly enhanced game framerates. For our processor comparison, all testing has been performed at 1024x768, 32-bit with audio disabled.
Comanche 4 is a very CPU-dependant benchmark, and the Celeron performed very poorly in this test. Our low-end Athlon XP 1600+ was able to best the Celeron, even when overclocked to 3.0 GHz! In this test, the Celeron is just begging for a higher L2 cache, as 128K simply doesn't cut it in a CPU-bound flight-sim.
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