The New VIA Cyrix III: The Worlds First 0.15 Micron x86 CPU

Gaming Performance - Quake III Arena - Win98SE

We know that the cache level is fine, as is the clock speed, so what could be holding the new Cyrix III back in 3D gaming? The most likely culprit is one that has been the Achilles heel for the Cyrix and WinChip processors for quite some time: the FPU or floating point unit.

Well, as the Quake III Arena scores show, the FPU of the Samuel2 Cyrix III seems to still be a thorn in the chip's side. Quake III Arena, as well as other 3D intensive applications and games are very FPU intensive. Usually, Quake III Arena can give us a glimpse of a FPU's strength.

In the case of the Samuel2 based Cyrix III, this glimpse is not very promising. Since we know that Quake III Arena is also very memory bandwidth intensive, and we know that the memory bandwidth on the Cyrix III is much larger than that on the Celeron (133 MHz bus versus the Celeron's 66 MHz bus), we can eliminate this as a problem spot. Therefore, the most likely culprit is the Cyrix III's FPU.

Regardless of the problem, the performance of the Cyrix III is sub par. The CPU performs 17% slower than the lower clocked Celeron and 67% slower than the also lower clocked Duron 600 MHz.

Although VIA did suggest that this CPU is not intended for 3D game play, the CPU actually performs closer to the competition in our Quake III test at 640x480x32 then in business centered benchmarks.

At 1024x768x32, the Cyrix III continues to lag behind. Here the CPU performs 15% slower than the Celeron and 49% slower than the Duron. Poor FPU performance or not, the Cyrix III is performing slow considering its 667 MHz clock speed.