AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.2GHz & Duron 800MHz

The Pentium III has historically held an advantage over the Athlon under Quake III Arena, and while we see that trend continue with the Athlon 1GHz and the Pentium III 1GHz, the 1.2GHz Athlon still manages to pull away to offer the highest x86 gaming performance available.

The Celeron's 4-way set associative L2 cache is holding it back under Quake III Arena as even the overclocked 850MHz Celeron is still 14% slower than the Duron 800. All of the regularly clocked 66MHz FSB Celerons, as you can imagine, are much, much lower in performance than the overclocked 850 and are much lower in performance than the Duron 800.

At 1024 x 768 x 32 the test bed's GeForce2 GTS is memory bandwidth limited and thus the performance numbers all come out looking the same. The only thing that would help you here is a faster video card.