Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz: One step closer

3D Gaming Performance

Quake III Arena has been with us for a couple of years now and we will continue to use it under id can provide us with another great benchmark.  John Carmack is truly one of the best developers in the industry that also happens to have a keen eye for hardware; it’s no wonder that all of id’s games happen to be great benchmarks as well.

For this test we’re using the latest 129f patch and the built in FOUR demo.  To run the demo simply enable timedemo mode (“timedemo 1”) and playback demo four (“demo four”).

Ever since its introduction the Pentium 4 has done very well in gaming performance and as you can see here, its Quake III Arena dominance continues. 

We are given some insight into the keys to the Pentium 4’s performance since the only other CPU with advanced hardware data prefetch capabilities is the Athlon MP which happens to be the third runner up in the set.  The Athlon MP’s core gives it about a 6% advantage over the regular Athlon which is enough to give it a small performance lead over the Athlon 1.4. 

There’s no question that the Pentium 4 is definitely a strong Quake III Arena performer, but what about with some newer game engines?

The Pentium 4’s dominance does not extend into the AquaMark benchmark which is based off of the AquaNox DX8 game engine.  It is clear that the limitation in this benchmark is the performance of the test bed’s GeForce3 but since there aren’t many options to adjust in the benchmark itself we have to deal with it as is. 

Another DX8 engine to benchmark with is DroneZ; a favorite of NVIDIA since it can easily show off the feature set of the GeForce3.  However for our intentions it made the most sense to turn off the GeForce3 optimizations and actually run the benchmark in the “GeForce2 Bump” mode which is the highest quality preset in the game without resorting to using Pixel/Vertex shader programs.  The reason we did this was to prevent the GeForce3 from being the common bottleneck in all of the systems and increase the dependency on a fast CPU.  Obviously you’d want to play with those features enabled if you had a GeForce3 which would also decrease the performance gap between many of the contenders here.

Again we see the Pentium 4 holding the lead over the Athlon, and at 2GHz the platform is unstoppable.  Also it’s quite interesting to note that the Athlon MP 1.2 is able to offer performance equivalent to the regular Athlon 1.4 which maintains an 8% lead over the Athlon 1.2.