3dfx Voodoo4 4500 & Voodoo5 5500 Preview

Quake III Arena Quaver

Any attempt to substantially push a video card to its limits using the built in Quake III Arena demos is almost impossible. The level is not only low on the texture front, it also does not contain as many rooms as other levels. Resolutions and colors where the demo plays flawlessly are often too high to play the game in full with.

In order to fully test how memory bandwidth and RAM size affects video card performance, a separate and more stressful benchmark is needed. For the purposes of this test, we turned to Anthony "Reverend" Tan's Quaver benchmarking demo. It was a well known fact that some levels of Quake III Arena push video cards harder than others. The most notorious of these levels is the Q3DM9 map, with a reported 30 plus megabytes of textures.