Quake III: Arena
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
The first test in our serious of benchmarks is Quake III: Arena. This has become the staple benchmark for testing CPUs and speeds in gaming. The engine of Quake III allows the processor speed to greatly affect the frames per second (fps) of the game in lower resolutions, which makes a great gauge for testing the Duron and Thunderbird against each other. We used only two resolutions here to show you the difference between high end and low end gaming.
What we see if the power of the AMD core, which is common in both the Thunderbird and Duron processors. Both scores in 16-bit and 32-bit are very close, and only minimally higher with the Thunderbird processor, probably due to the extra L2 cache enabled on the more expensive processor. At this low of a resolution, the processor is the main factor in the frame-rate and the Duron and Thunderbird are head-to-head.
In this test, at much higher resolution, the numbers are still much closer together than I initially expected. These numbers are reflective of the power of the video card (Hercules GeForce 2 GTS 64MB) more than the extra power of the processors. There are more memory bandwidth and AGP bandwidth issues at work here, but I wanted to include a higher resolution test for the gamers who are interested in this battle of the AMD processors. As you no doubt tell, the margin in performance has increase over the 640×480 testing, but to any signficant amount.
