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.
Well, the story behind this benchmark on the Tyan board might need an article of its own. In our previous reviews, such as in the Tiger MP review, running Quake III was easy, and enabling the /r_smp 1 option gave the player the ability to utilize both of the processors for great frame rates. However, it was not to be in this case.When I attempted to enable the SMP option in the game, the system would consistently lock up and need to be hard rebooted. I first thought this was a driver or bios problem, so I checked and updated each of them. I installed the latest AGP driver from AMD and one from Tyan. I reformatted the system about 10 times just to try to get the SMP enabled in Quake III. But nothing worked.
In single processor mode, the benchmarks ran fine, without a problem, but as I expected, were much slower than the KT266A counterpart in the lower resolutions. And just as so this is not a huge hit on the Tyan MPX board specifically, I have two other MPX motherboards from different manufacturers, and they are both showing the same results.
As I explained above, the Tiger MPX loses in all the resolutions, but only notably in the 640×480 resolutions, where it is down by nearly 16%. However, taking into consideration most people play the games at 1024×768 or higher, the difference slips to about 11% in 32-bit color.
