Intel Pentium III 600

by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 29, 1999 12:44 PM EST

Quake 3 Arena Test 2 (1.07) is the dream benchmark for games, although idSoftware has indicated that the test is in no way representative of the final performance of Q3A upon shipping the test does allow us to run four different levels of benchmarks that stress both processors and video cards alike.   The four different settings are taken directly from the system configuration options and are 'Fastest', 'Fast', 'Normal' and 'High Quality'

The benchmark was run by bringing up the console (hit the '~' key), then by typing in 'timedemo 1' and hitting return then typing in 'demo q3testdemo1.dm3' and hitting return.  The tests were repeated until consistent results were obtained and then averaged and recorded.

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Gaming Performance - Q3Test 2 1.07 - NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra - Win98

Fastest

Fast

Normal

High Quality

Intel Pentium II 233

35.6

32.9

30.1

29.6

Intel Pentium II 266

39.9

36.7

33.7

33.1

Intel Pentium II 300

44.2

41

37.3

35.4

Intel Pentium II 333

48.3

44.8

40.8

37.5

Intel Pentium II 350

52.7

49.4

45.3

39.3

Intel Pentium II 400

60.4

54.9

50.8

40

Intel Pentium III 450

65.3

60.8

55.9

40.8

Intel Pentium III 500

72.7

67.2

61.3

40.9

Intel Pentium III 550

77.8

71.9

64.4

41

Intel Pentium III 600

83.8

77.7

70.6

41

As you can see, the High Quality setting maxes out the video card's performance, giving the Pentium III 600 very little opportunity to show its increase in power over even the Pentium III 450.   The scores taken at the Fastest, Fast, and Normal settings are more representative of increases in gaming performance the Pentium III 600 will provide for you.  The absence of the Intel Celeron as well as processors other than the Pentium II/III from this comparison will be made up for in an upcoming CPU comparison on AnandTech, the purpose of this comparison is to simply show the performance increase the Pentium III 600 offers over previous generation P3 and P2 processors. 

General Performance - Win98 Gaming Performance - Win98 (cont)
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