Discrete Graphics: Quake III, UT2003
Why Try Discrete?
In short, because utilizing a discrete graphics solution (not-integrated) allows us to see the full gaming potential of the processors themselves, not the integrated graphics. The integrated graphics differ on each system and thus our gaming results were a bit skewed for direct comparisons between the processors. If you wanted to perhaps build a VERY cheap gaming rig for older games, then you’d be using a low-cost AGP graphics card as well, such as the ATI Radeon 9600XT we used here, that can be found for as low as $140.
Using the 9600XT on both systems, we decided to re-run the main gaming tests to get new scores as well as run a couple of Far Cry benchmarks as well.
Both systems are showing identical performance on the aging Quake III engine when using the external 9600XT graphics card. As Quake III is a very memory-dependent benchmark, I believe that if AMD had decided to use a 400 MHz bus on the Sempron, and thus DDR400 memory, it would have easily surpassed the Celeron, but as it is, Intel is right up there with AMD.
Unreal Tournament 2003 is another story, as we can see on Min Detail, there is a 25% difference between the Sempron and the Celeron at the lowest resolution. As we turn up the resolution though, the 9600XT becomes the bottleneck and the scores even out quite nicely. On Max Detail level, even at 1024×768, the Sempron 2800+ carries a nice lead over the Celeron.
