When testing the OpenGL gaming performance of any video accelerator, the application of choice for most people is Quake III: Arena. With it's advanced graphics and support for many of the common features required from a 3D accelerator to achieve top-notch performance in other OpenGL games Q3A serves as our preferred OpenGL game benchmark. Without further ado, here are the scores for our Normal Quality tests (16-bit color, 16-bit textures, bi-linear filtering):
While the DDR based Outrageous 3D board definitely has an edge over the SDR based LeadTek board in these benchmarks as well the lead isn't all that impressive, at least not at 1024 x 768 where the 2.9 fps increase in performance isn't even noticeable during actual gameplay. Again, as the resolution increases the gap widens, at 1280 the Outrageous 3D delivers an impressive 52.2 fps which is 8.5 fps over what the LeadTek board was capable of delivering, still the LeadTek board delivered a playable 43.7 fps which isn't bad. At 1600 x 1200 both boards max out their fillrate performance so the gap closes a little but still leaves the DDR based Outrageous 3D board with a clear lead over it's SDR competition, also note the rather formidable performance increase achieved by the DDR GeForce over it's predecessor the TNT 2 Ultra at this resolution (over 90%) proving that the GeForce DDR is truly fillrate king.
Now we realize that not everyone will be satisfied playing at 16-bit color with the "Normal Quality" settings (we know we don't) hence we also took the three boards for a spin with the settings at "High Quality" where 32-bit rendering is enabled by default as well as 32-bit textures and tri-linear filtering, read on for the scores