AMD Athlon 750

UTBench.dem can be considered to be the equivalent of a crusher demo for Unreal Tournament. While it isn't nearly as long and involved as crusher was, UTBench does provide a good idea of how poorly a system can perform under stress in UT.

The Pentium III seems to hold a serious advantage over the Athlon in Unreal Tournament, one reason could be UT's ability to stress the L2 cache performance of a system. Other explanations could include heavy SSE optimizations in the UT code or in the GeForce drivers themselves.

The reason we were leaning towards an L2 cache performance explanation is because the performance of the Athlon 750 was identical to that of the Athlon 700, indicating that the slower L2 cache of the Athlon 750 was bringing down its performance. Speaking from the perspective of real world gameplay, the difference between the 6 processors is minuscule and any performance advantage the Athlon 750 would hold over the 700 wouldn't justify the price. In this case, the 750 has a very good purpose, that is, pushing down the prices of all of the other CPUs in the Athlon line.