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In terms of gaming, the probably worst benchmark to use for a direct comparison of the Athlon vs. the P4 processor is Quake3 Arena. There is usually no way the Athlon can even come close to the performance of the P4 and this has not changed at all with the Thoroughbred. Needless to say that it is faster than the XP2100+ but what is almost surprising is the fact that the XP2200+ comes very close to the P4 2.4GHz running a 400 MHz FSB.

Quake3 Arena "Normal"
At 640 x 480 x 16 bpp there is relatively little limitation of the graphics card and we are loking at raw system performance. We were using Demo_four. The XP2100+ and 2200+ come in last place. To make things a bit more dramatic, I have thrown in a few benchmarks using PC1066 Rambus even though it is currently not really available.

What is interesting here is another tidbit and that is the overproportional performance increase of the TBred over the Palomino. Just as a quick sanity check we ran a few benches of the download version Quake3 Arena Test:

Quake3 Arena Test "Normal"
Demo001 (turquois) and Demo002 (red): we see the same solid performance increase of the TBred over the Palomino, that is, a 3.8% increase in clock speed gives a 7.2% increase in performance. For reference, the score of the P4 2.53 is shown, love it if you are an Intel fan, disregard it if you don't care.

Quake3 Arena is a relatively outdated game, what about the current crop of highly sophisticated games or demos like 3DMark2001 SE or Codecreatures?

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