Intel Pentium III 866, 850

Under UnrealTournament we have the Pentium III once again taking the lead away from the Athlon, but if you look at the performance differences it is obvious that the final decision should come down to the overall affordability/availability of the particular CPU in question.

You are not going to notice a 2 fps difference in performance making the Pentium III and Athlon equally viable options here for the avid gamer. If you're going for the Pentium III once again, the VIA 133A chipset is a much more intelligent option than the i820 + RDRAM combo simply because of cost.

There are obviously a number of other limitations in this test outside of the CPU which is explained by the relatively small difference in performance between the top 15 processors on this chart.

These limitations are mainly a result of the UT engine itself which explains why the performance doesn't change all that much when going from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 at least in comparison to a game like Quake III Arena where the difference is huge because of a clear limitation kicking in.