MadOnion's 3DMark 2001SE is a very popular 3D benchmark tool, and assuming the video card and driver revision is kept absolutely consistent, then it can be a good system/CPU test as well. 3DMark 2001SE also fills the dual role of doing some idea as to which processor may be the best fit for upcoming DirectX 8.X games. Benchmark testing was performed at the default setting of 1024x768, 32-bit color/textures, and Pure Hardware T&L support.
3DMark 2001SE is one of the closest competitions in this review, and the Athlon XP 3000+ loses by a very small margin to the Pentium 4-3.06 and 2.8 GHz processors. Once again we see the 512K cache of the Athlon XP 3000+ beat out the pure clock speed of the Athlon XP 2800+.
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 High Quality detail and a 1024x768 resolution, using release 1.30, along with the standard "demo Four".
Quake 3 continues to be the domain of the Pentium 4, and it's more a case of determining how much ground AMD has made up than a question of an overall victory. In this case AMD has done quite well, and the Athlon XP 3000+ shows some legs in surpassing the score of the Athlon XP 2800+.
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 Atrium demo to determine potential framerates, at 1024x768x32-bit.
Serious Sam 2 is a double-win for the Athlon XP 3000+, as not only does it beat out the Pentium 4-3.06 GHz, but puts a hurt on the Athlon XP 2800+ as well. This is an excellent result for the newest AMD processor, and it becomes the first in our testing to crack the 200 FPS mark.
