3DMark 2001 and Quake III

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

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A disappointing first test, for sure. This will actually happen several times throughout the rest of the benchmarks, and there is a good reason. Those programs that do not have built in support SMP (dual-processing) will show little to no improvement. However, you should keep in mind that while this benchmark was going on, the other processor that wasn’t being used, could very well have been doing something else, and shown no slowdown. That is something you wouldn’t be able to do in the uniprocessor systems.

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To get good test results out of Quake III, you have to first enable SMP mode in the console. After doing so, we see a very dramatic improvement in scores at this low a resolution! While surely no one with a dual-Athlon MP system will want to play Q3 at 640×480, these numbers show the processing power of the Athlon system.

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At a much more playable resolution, the above 200 fps score is amazing! After I ran this demo, I then proceed to play a few rounds….for testing of course.

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Again, the almighty bottleneck known as the GeForce 3 card is the problem here. Still, the Athlon MP system is able to far a few frames faster, even at a lower CPU speed.

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