Quake 3 Arena Performance

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 not be the newest game in our benchmark suite, but it's still great at defining old school performance, and also scales extremely well to faster hardware. As expected, the gaming performance of the Athlon 64 X2 line is simply too much for the Pentium EE 840 and Pentium D models to handle, a fact that will come as no surprise. We also see the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and 4200+ start falling a bit back of the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 4400+, as the larger L2 cache does to pay off in faster Quake 3 performance. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues through our game benchmarking session.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby Performance

Unreal Tournament 2003 includes a benchmark program that automatically tests in two separate modes. The one we're going to be looking at is Flyby, which takes a canned tour of the UT game world, then offers up a framerate score and really hammers both the CPU and video card. The Botmatch results are no longer shown, instead leaving that for the improved Unreal Tournament 2004 to supply.

The Athlon 64 X2 assumes control of the high-end Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby performance rankings, and literally leaves the Intel competition in the dust. There is also a noticeable framerate gap between the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and 4200+, with 512K of L2 cache per core, and the 1MB equipped Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 4400+ models.

Unreal Tournament 2004 Performance

Unreal Tournament 2004 is an upgraded version of the popular UT series, and includes support for Botmatch demos. This is the next evolution for Unreal Tournament graphics and performance, and is yet another serious test for current PC hardware. Botmatch performance is also more reflective of CPU power than Flyby, giving UT 2004 special significance in processor testing. For this benchmark, we've used the UMark GUI interface with the following options and settings: 3 Botmatch maps, 12 players and maximum detail graphics.

It's much the same story in Unreal Tournament 2004 benchmarking, and once again, it's AMD running away with the competition. We also find the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and 4400+ proving to be a bit faster in the gaming arena than their Manchester competition, and we see this by the proximity of the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and 4400+ performance scores.