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".
To start off our game benchmarking section, we present a somewhat strange Quake 3 result. Although the Athlon 64 contingent were in the lead once again, the Pentium EE 955 did post a respectable score, but it's when we compare it to lower-clocked Intel processors that it seems a bit odd. We tested this every which way but loose, and it just came down to the fact that something about the i975X platform does not agree with Quake 3. This is definitely an anomaly, and certainly not a harbinger of things to come with the newer game tests.
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 Pentium Extreme Edition 955 again falls back from the Athlon 64 X2 competition, but this time it manages to outperform the other Intel Pentium EE and Pentium D models. The overall Unreal Tournament 2003 results are still firmly in AMD's court, and even the 3.46 GHz, 1066 MHz Pentium EE 955 can't outpace the Athlon 64 X2 3800+.
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, where the Pentium EE 955 again posts the best Intel score, but lags well back of the AMD competition. AMD has made great strides in terms of Unreal Tournament engine performance, and it's tough to see Intel suddenly come back into contention during this CPU generation.
