Linux Video Card Comparison - October 2000

3D Performance: Quake III Arena

The de facto standard for consumer 3D benchmarking is Quake III Arena for the simple reason that it is the most widely used 3D application by the average user. In fact, drivers are often criticized for being optimized only for Quake, particularly by non-gamers. Yes, 3D is useful for other things than gaming. Regardless, Quake III makes for an excellent 3D benchmark due the fact that it still drives sales of modern 3D cards.

Unmatched, the NVIDIA cards simply dominate Quake III performance. Note the bandwidth limiting of the GeForce2s at lower resolutions, they're simply not challenged. The Voodoo5 5500 is held back by the fact that its drivers only support one CPU at this time. With the upcoming dual-CPU Voodoo5 driver release and the soon to be released Radeon drivers, maybe we'll see a card get somewhere close to the GeForce2s in performance. The G400 and Rage128 round out third place with very playable performance. Intel's 815 chipset on-board video shows its age (it's based on an updated version of the Intel i740 card from long ago) and comes in dead last.

We noticed no rendering errors or other graphic glitches with any of these cards. Once again, drivers are often engineered for Quake III, and this is likely a result of that fact.