AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Review
By Vince Freeman :
January 8, 2002
Quake 3 Arena
Quake 3: Arena is our primary gaming benchmark here at SE due to it highly repeatable results and support for SIMD optimizations (MMX, 3DNow! and SSE). This makes it a great match for the Pentium 4, as well as a great testing ground for the new SSE enhancements of the Athlon XP. It also happens to be an extremely popular game and Quake 3 performance is often used as the barometer for many CPU and 3D video card purchases.
Quake 3 was tested 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 Default settings, and MAX uses the standard High Quality setting and increases the detail levels a bit. Quake 3 testing has also been updated to release 1.30, along with a natural progression to the included "demo Four".
No matter how much ground the Athlon XP makes up on the Pentium 4, victory in Quake 3 remains elusive. Just when it looks like the next Athlon XP release may take the crown, Intel releases a new processor and crushes the dream. This is the same story all over again, as the Pentium 4-2.2 GHz is just too much for the Athlon XP 2000+. This is also true no matter the platform, as the Pentium 4-2.2 GHz/i845D system beats out all Athlon XP challengers, discounting the small difference in CPU-limited MAX testing.
Serious Sam Performance
Serious Sam is a real old-school game benchmark, in that it respects pure horsepower rather than newfangled features or API support. Just give Serious Sam a healthy dose of system juice, and leave the DirectX 8.1 scores to 3DMark 2001. This makes it not only an excellent judge of general gaming performance, but a very good barometer for basic gaming power. For our specific tests, we have used the in-game demos to determine the potential framerate, using both 16 and 32-bit modes.
As we expected, the Athlon XP 2000+ really took it to the Pentium 4-2.2 GHz in Serious Sam testing. This happened in both 16 and 32-bit testing and across all platforms. Even the vaunted i850/RDRAM duo couldn't help Intel. This is an interesting scenario, since Serious Sam may be the poster child for all the non-SSE products out there and the performance you may expect with many older games.
