Quake 3 Arena

Quake 3: Arena is our primary gaming benchmark here at SE and its design really shows off some of the advantages of the Pentium 4. Quake 3 is both floating-point intensive and has support for SIMD optimizations (MMX, 3DNow! and SSE), making it a great fit for the Intel Pentium 4. 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 testing is done in WindowsXP with different scales of 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 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 standard "demo Four" it includes.

Where Quake 3 is concerned, the Pentium 4/i850 platform still rules supreme and easily surpasses the scores of the Athlon XP 2000+. The depth of the advantage is startling, as even on the Pentium 4-2.0A, the i850 still powers by the Athlon XP 2000+ and almost matches it using the older Pentium 4-2.0 GHz. When we move to a pure DDR comparison, the Athlon XP really starts to shine. The performance difference between the i845 and nForce is negligible at best, as the Athlon XP 2000+ and Pentium 4-2.2 GHz show them at a Quake 3 dead heat.

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.

With the above byline, how could any processor but the Athlon XP win out? The brute force of the Athlon XP 2000+ built up a significant lead over the Pentium 4-2.2 GHz and even the Athlon XP 1900+ posted impressive scores. The Pentium 4 is no slouch either, but this demonstrates that a specific processor design may hold advantages in one area, while losing out in another.