Quake III: Arena makes use of Intel's SSE optimizations, leveling the playing field between the processors. In a fantastic display of visuals, we ran both systems through a low-resolution 640x480 timedemo in order to measure raw CPU power.
The mention of Quake III conjures images of volumetric fog, impressive shaders, and animated textures - all in splendid 32-bit color. While T&L enables some of the transform functions to be sent to the GPU (for those lucky GeForce owners), processors are still responsible for all of the lighting (vertex and lightmap) and those metallic shaders. Because of this, fast CPUs are as important as ever.
How does the Athlon, unassisted by hardware T&L, fare in computing the intense scenes that Quake III delivers?
Performing within a frame of the hard-to-find PIII 800MHz Coppermine, AMD's Athlon 850 shows it's more than capable in older software as well the most cutting edge first person shooters. Considering that, in order to reproduce the i820 scores, RDRAM must be used, AMD's Athlon looks even more appealing on a value level.
Once the Athlons with on-die cache start arriving, expect these numbers to be significantly higher.