Quake 3 Arena

Quake 3: Arena is our favorite gaming benchmark here at SE and its design can illustrate performance aspects of both CPUs and 3D video cards. This makes it a very flexible benchmark, and useful for many different performance comparisons. Quake 3 is both floating-point intensive and has support for SIMD optimizations (MMX, 3DNow! and SSE), making it a great test for the enhanced Duron 1.2 GHz. In Quake 3 testing, the Duron 1, 1.1 and 1.2 GHz processors were identified as supporting the game's Pentium III optimizations, while the Duron 950 and Athlon 1.2 GHz processors were not.

Quake 3 testing under both Windows 98SE and 2000 are included, with benchmarking using Normal (16-bit), High Quality and MAX graphic settings. Normal is the basic Quake 3 option (set at 16-bit color/textures), High Quality is at the Default setting, and MAX uses the standard High Quality settings and increases the detail levels to the max. Both Normal and High Quality benchmarking are quite good for pure CPU comparisons, but at the MAX level, the video card can often be the limiting factor.

The Quake 3 benchmarks basically illustrate that while the Duron Morgan core does yield significant performance increases over older Duron models, it is still not quite in Athlon territory. Still, this is a comparison of similar speed processors and as we proved in previous Duron reviews, give the Duron a 50-100 MHz core speed advantage and the Athlon soon finds itself in second place.

Serious Sam Performance

Serious Sam is an interesting 3D first-person shooter that also offers some innovative and detailed benchmarking tools. For our specific tests, we have used the in-game Memphis demo to determine potential framerates, using both 16 and 32-bit modes.

The Serious Sam benchmarks confirm what we found with Quake 3, that the Duron 1.2 GHz is certainly a fast gaming CPU but it still loses out to a same-speed Athlon.