VIA Apollo Pro 266: The P3 gets DDR

Quake III Arena has consistently shown us that it not only responds with a decent performance increase when given more FSB bandwidth but also when given more memory bandwidth. In this case, the Apollo Pro 266 is able to almost match the i815 in terms of performance. While this may not seem like much of an accomplishment you'll have to remember that the i815 has actually been a very difficult competitor to beat in this test.

This doesn't mean that you should throw away all of your PC133 SDRAM and pick up a Pro 266 board, however looking towards the future, if the motherboard and DDR SDRAM is priced identically to an 815 + PC133 SDRAM combo then there will be very little to discourage going after the Apollo Pro 266.

At 1024 x 768 x 32, as we have proven countless times, a game like Quake III Arena is limited by the memory bandwidth available not to our CPU but to our video card. This results in the nearly identical performance across the board.

With the next-generation of graphics cards due out in a few months now this limitation should hopefully be addressed soon enough.