AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 2: Overclocking

Gaming performance is another area where the higher clock speed means more than a faster L2 cache. Our Quake 3 tests can be treated much like the 3D rendering tests from before; they are dependent primarily upon raw FPU performance, which scales tightly with CPU clock speed rather than L2 cache frequency.

As the resolution goes up, the performance gap decreases, but the trend remains the same -- clock speed over L2 cache speed.

At 1024 x 768 we seem to hit the ceiling with the GeForce, which eliminates most of the performance differences among the CPUs.