Return to Castle Wolfenstein is another Quake-based 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 High Quality detail settings and have increased the resolution to 1024x768.
In this benchmark the Celeron performed much better than it did in Comanche 4. The Celeron 2.0 GHz is able to score a little higher than our two low-end Athlon XP chips without overclocking. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is still a Quake 3 Arena-based game, and is a benchmark where the Pentium 4-based chips to considerably better than AMD's Athlon XP processors.
The Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo includes a benchmark program that automatically tests two separate modes. One is Flyby, which takes a canned tour of the UT game world and then offers up a frame rate score and really hammers both the CPU and video card. The second is Botmatch, and this is a more game-based benchmark than Flyby, and is a far more CPU-oriented test. In this section, we've run Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1024x768 x 32-bit.
In UT 2003 Flyby testing, the Celeron again takes a backseat to the Athlon XP 1900+ and Pentium 4, but when the overclocking gloves come off, it's able to reach the same approximate performance as a Pentium 4-1.8 GHz (256K).
The Botmatch test raises the CPU bar quite significantly, and here the Celeron is not able to beat even the Athlon XP 1600+, either at standard or 3.0 GHz overclocked speeds. The UT 2003 Botmatch test is able to expose weaknesses in any CPU, and with only a 128K of L2 cache the Celeron paints a big target.
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