AMD Duron 900 and Roadmap Update

As we move into gaming performance, the CPU's importance begins to take a secondary role provided that you have a fast enough graphics accelerator.  Generally speaking, almost all of the CPUs in this chart (maybe with the exception of the two 66MHz FSB Celerons) are enough to drive a GeForce2 GTS or GeForce2 Ultra to the point that you're not going to be severely CPU limited. 

If you're upgrading or purchasing a new system for improved gaming performance you're going to have to ask yourself what type of game you're looking to get better performance in and where you are currently limited. 

Luckily games shouldn't be too disk limited, meaning that as long as you have enough memory (128MB - 256MB being the ideal target range) you shouldn't be swapping to disk except for during level loading stages.

Games like Quake III Arena mainly depend on a graphics card that is capable of delivering high fill rate power, which the test GeForce2 Ultra does quite well.  However there are other games such as Flight Simulators and 2D real-time strategy titles that are more dependent on raw CPU power than graphics card fill rate.

UnrealTournament, another first person shooter like Quake III Arena, also focuses mostly on fill rate potential and then CPU power.  Memory and FSB bandwidth do play relatively important roles in performance here as well. 

The engine scales relatively well with CPU speed at this low of a resolution, and with the GeForce2 Ultra actually continues to scale well at higher resolutions too.  The Duron 900 is exactly 2.5% faster than the Duron 800, which is on-par with the improvements we have seen in other benchmarks as well.