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 AMD and Intel processors. 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 starting with High Quality settings, then racking in-game detail settings to maximum, and a 1024x768 resolution, using release 1.30, along with the standard "demo Four".
The first part of the Quake 3 benchmarking gives us a taste of what will come on the integrated video side. The Sempron 2800+ has a huge advantage in this area, as the GeForce4 MX video of the nForce2 allows it to easily surpass Intel's Extreme Graphics 2 core. In Quake 3 the Sempron 2800+ more than doubles the score of the Celeron 335, while in Radeon 9600 Pro testing, the Celeron 335 squeaks ahead. The Sempron 3100+ redeems itself with a super Quake 3 result, falling just short of the top score posted by the Pentium 4-2.8E GHz.
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 Quake 3, and give our processors a much tougher workload.
The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory performance scores are similar to those of Quake 3, but with some differences. The Sempron 2800+ vs. Celeron 335 integrated video battle is another easy victory for AMD, but even with the Radeon 9600 Pro in place, the Sempron 2800+ still takes the top spot. The Sempron 3100+ continues it superlative 3D gaming results by posting the top score in Wolfenstein: ET, and really shows it's a gaming demon on a budget.
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.
The Comanche 4 scores show us another advantage of the nForce2 platform: its support of hardware T&L. The Intel Extreme Graphics 2 core does not support this, and as such, could not complete the Comanche 4 benchmark. The Sempron 2800+ also takes the performance lead over the Celeron 335 with dedicated AGP graphics, and the Celeron D core may be showing its Prescott roots. AMD's Sempron 3100+ again posts a very nice score in Comanche 4, but is forced to take second place behind the surprising Pentium 4-2.8 GHz.
