Quake 3: Arena is an oldie but a goldie when it comes to gaming benchmarks and its design really shows off some of the advantages of the Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 processors. Quake 3 is both floating-point intensive and has support for SIMD optimizations (MMX, 3DNow! and SSE), making it a great fit for processor and subsystem testing. It also happens to scale nicely to faster CPUs, video cards and motherboards, and Quake 3 performance is still used as a barometer for many hardware 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".
The Quake 3 benchmark results show a very slight framerate advantage for the 925X over the 915G, but this is virtually a dead heat in terms of real-world performance. The Intel GMA 800 graphics may not be able to match the Radeon X600, but a 100+ fps score for an integrated graphics core is still a very good performance mark. In terms of real-world gameplay, Quake 3 was easily playable on the Intel GMA 800 at 1024x768 HQ.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a good system benchmark, but we've moved to updated version: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. This game has made a few revisions to the basic RtCW design, as well as solidifying the features support. The setup is the same as Quake 3, with a 1024x768 resolution, and High quality defaults with in-game detail settings at maximum. We have used a custom demo taken from the Railgun game area, along with plenty of MP participants. This is one tough demo test, so expect the framerates to sink below those of Quake 3, and give our platforms a much tougher workload.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory performance starts out similar to Quake 3, with the 925X squeezing out another slight victory over the 915G. The Intel GMA 800 integrated graphics show a serious drop-off, and the overall framerate falls below 30 fps. Wolfenstein: ET is a far more detailed game test than Quake 3, and this does take a toll on the integrated graphics core of the Intel 915G.
The Comanche 4 benchmark from Novalogic gives us an opportunity to use an actual flight sim for performance testing. Flight sims are notorious for their CPU-dependence, and this makes the Comanche 4 benchmark potentially a better CPU test than it is for 3D video cards. The reliance on the CPU shows itself off in the benchmark, and even the slightest difference in framerates could pay off in significantly enhanced game framerates. For our processor comparison, all testing has been performed at 1024x768, 32-bit with audio disabled.
The Comanche 4 scores are again a very close race, and it's another dead heat in the Intel 925X vs. 915G performance race. The 915G with GMA 800 integrated graphics was not able to complete this test, due to the requirement of hardware T&L. This is an issue that can crop up in games, depending on the level of T&L support (CPU vs. hardware) the game requires.
The X2 - The Threat Demo is a tough gaming benchmark that takes the form of a rolling demo. It may be technically DirectX 8 in design, but its high-end 3D support and features make this a serious test for current 3D games, and not far removed from our DirectX 9 benchmarking. Once started, the X2 demo displays various game scenes, and incorporates the space-sim aspects of the game into a test run that can really separate the high-end hardware from the pack.
The Intel 925X and 915G are once again very close together in the X2 Demo benchmark, but in this test, the Intel GMA 800 integrated graphics put on a much better show. Overall framerates are approximately 50% that of the higher-end 925X and 915G with dedicated video platforms, and this is the best relative performance we've seen so far.
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