Quake 3: Arena is may be getting a little old when it comes to gaming benchmarks, but its design still shows off some of the advantages of the AMD and Intel processors. Quake 3 is floating-point intensive and has support for SIMD optimizations (MMX, 3DNow! and SSE), which makes it a great fit for processor testing. It also happens to scale nicely to faster CPUs, video cards and motherboards, and Quake 3 performance continues to be the basis 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".
Quake 3 may be the elder statesman in our game benchmark suite, but it is still a very good judge of old school performance and it scales like mad. The overall scores bear this out, and we see a wide range of framerates between the various high-end processors. The Pentium 4 670 and Pentium 4-3.73 GHz EE are the only two Intel processors above the 500 fps mark, but even these powerhouses take a back seat to the top AMD Athlon 64 processors. Quake 3 is not designed with multi-threading in mind, and the Pentium D 820 falls back in line with its 2.8 GHz clock speed.
FarCry is a hot new first-person shooter that takes in-game graphics to the next level, although in a different direction than DOOM 3. Instead of darkness and confined spaces, FarCry places you outdoors, on bright sandy beaches, jungles or even on the water itself. This game gives our processors a different kind of a stress test, and rest assured that FarCry ranks up there with the very toughest 3D game benchmarks. For this test, we are using the full retail version, and the included in-game demo.
The FarCry benchmark results show the same basic trends that were evident in Quake 3 testing. The Pentium 4 670 and Pentium 4-3.73 GHz Extreme Edition post virtually equivalent results, while the Pentium D 820 performs more like a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 CPU.
Half-Life 2 is the latest in a line of serious first-person shooters from Valve, and has really taken in-game graphics to the next level. This is a great opportunity to really push our processors to the limit, as well as providing a counterpoint to newer 3D games like DOOM 3. This is also a CPU-reliant game in many ways, making Half-Life 2 a game that rewards higher-end processors and systems.
The Half-Life 2 benchmark scores are a bit different than our first two game tests, and this time it's the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 taking the top spot, followed closely by the Pentium 4 670 and Pentium 4-3.73 GHz EE. Although Half-Life 2 does seem to make some use of multi-threading, this doesn't help the 2.8 GHz Pentium D 8209 much, and it posts the lowest score on the chart.
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