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In the Forums... |
Posted: December 4, 2000 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Benchmarks (cont.) Quake 3 Arena  Quake 3 doesn’t depend too heavily on processing power as it does graphics acceleration power. It scales to better scores with faster video cards. These days, 1024x768 is the most common resolution that gamers choose to play at. Most people still use 15 to 17 inch monitors and only very recently have people started moving forward to 19 inches and higher. We can’t argue with 125.1FPS in High Quality mode. What’s starting to matter here is the price that you’ll have to pay for each processor. Which one is a better value? Let’s take a look at a game that’s definitely CPU intensive. Unreal Tournament  Unreal Tournament doesn’t boast high frame rates as much as Quake 3 does. This is because it’s more CPU dependant than graphics card dependant and it wasn't designed with Direct3D/OpenGL in mind (or so it seems). And UT is also not as graphics-intense as Quake 3. If it were, it would perform slower than it already does. While 60 to 75FPS is nothing to complain about, there’s just more detail and geometry headroom if UT were capable of 100FPS+ scores. However, UT stays very constant with resolution change, which is a good thing. I also tried UT at 1600x1200 and 1920x1440 and the performance was very much the same. 1920x1440 was actually playable. You’d be hard pressed to tell the difference playing UT on a 950MHz Thunderbird using a GeForce2 GTS and or Ultra. Make sure your card has 64MB of RAM though, because anything higher than 1280x1024 will take a toll on video memory. Here you see that our 950MHz Thunderbird performs very admirably. The difference between it and the 1GHz Thunderbird might not justify the cost of the 1GHz. Let’s move on. |
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