April 1999 Super7 3D Video Accelerator Comparison

AnandTech received a final revision Voodoo3 2000 AGP and a pre-release Voodoo3 3000 AGP for benchmarking purposes. AnandTech's Super7/Socket-7 test configuration was as follows:

• AMD K6-3 350 CXT, AMD K6-266
• Kryotech Cool K6-3 500
• ASUS P5A Aladdin V based Super7 Motherboard w/ 512KB Cache
• FIC PA-2013 MVP3 based Super7 Motherboard w/ 2MB Cache (for compatibility tests)
• 64MB of Memman/Mushkin SEC Original SDRAM was used in each test system
• Western Digital 5.1GB Ultra ATA/33 HDD
• Microsoft Windows 98

The benchmark software used was as follows:

• id Software's Quake 2 Version 3.20 using demo1.dm2 and 3Finger's crusher.dm2
• Monolith's Shogo using 3Finger's RevDemo
• 3DMark 99 for Image Quality Comparisons

Quake 2 and Shogo were singled out to be the two games used for benchmarking for two primary reasons: 1) the offered a sample of not only OpenGL/Direct3D based games, but also a samples of games with and without native 3DNow! drivers,.and 2) they provide a simple way of comparing each individual card’s performance with today’s games as the industry is about to witness an influx of new titles including id Software’s Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament Edition.

Quake 2’s demo1.dm2 was run at four resolutions, 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, and 1600 x 1200. The cards were run at 640 x 480 to show their maximum theoretical performance on each individual CPU, basically illustrating the CPU limitations of the card/chipset. The benchmarks were then conducted at 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 to illustrate real world gaming performance, and finally at 1600 x 1200 to illustrate the performance of a high-end system at that resolution, basically an indicator of whether or not resolutions that high were in fact playable. All resolutions in between 1024 x 768 and 1600 x 1200 were omitted due to the fact that they are not standard across most 3D games.

For the in-depth gaming performance tests Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo was used to simulate the worst case scenario in terms of Quake 2 performance, the point at which your frame rate will rarely drop any further. In contrast, the demo1.dm2 demo was used to simulate the ideal situation in terms of Quake 2 performance, the average high point for your frame rate in normal play. The range covered by the two benchmarks can be interpreted as the range in which you can expect average frame rates during gameplay. Due to the nature of the crusher.dm2 benchmark, only real world scenarios were depicted, and the benchmark was only run at 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768.

The RevDemo Shogo benchmark was run at the same resolutions as Quake 2’s demo1.dm2.