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Quake3 Arena has always been one of the strongest applications for the P4. We were using point release 1.30 with the built-in four.dm_66 demo and the new DLLs posted recently that speed things up a bit. To make a long story short, originally, these DLLs were supposed to mostly increase the performance of the Athlon, however, we see exactly the same increase that is 14% across the board with all CPUs used. But then, I thought we should speed things up a bit and that is exactly what we did.

512 x 384 Fastest

I remember a report from about 2 years ago about a built-in frame limitation of Quake 3 Arena to no more than 100 fps. Funny how times change. Anyway, we see the 2.2 and the 2.0 pulling ahead of the XP2000+ which still leads the Willamette.

512 x 384 Fast

With slightly increasing bandwidth requirements, the three top scores pretty much even out. Differences are in the noise but the 2.2 GHz Northwood is still marginally faster.

640 x 480 Normal

At the Normal setting, the 2.0 GHz Northwood and the XP2000+ are head to head. The difference is purely statistical at this setting

800 x 600 High Quality

At the High Quality setting, the higher memory bandwidth of the VIA KT266A chipset pushes the XP 2000+ ahead of the Northwood 2.0 GHz but the Athlon still cannot catch the 2.2 GHz Intel flagship processor.

In summary, at lower resolution, the raw power of the Northwood with all its optimizations for Quake3 Arena gives it a clear victory over the AMD XP 2000+. With increasing resolution, the differences become smaller and at the high quality setting, the XP2000+ overtakes the 2.0 GHz Northwood.

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