Quake 3 Arena's
"High Quality" setting is far more visually
appealing than the "Fastest / 32 Bit" settings used
in the previous test. For this test, not only
did we set the game to "High Quality", but we
enabled tri-linear filtering and set the geometric
and texture detail to their highest settings.
QUAKE 3 ARENA:
The above graph is an
illustration as to why Quake 3 is losing it's
usefulness as a raw performance benchmark.
Even with all of the graphical options set to
maximum, both cards were able to achieve high
frame rates all the way up to 1600x1200.
Unless there are dozens of models on screen, in the
heat of some intense action, Quake 3 is no longer
able to stress this current generation of nVidia
powered graphics cards. In this test, the
earlier trend continued as the GeForce 3 Ti 500
had double-digit performance gains over a standard
GeForce 3 at high resolutions.
We also ran this same
test using all three AA methods available on the
GeForce 3 line of cards...
At 1024x768, all of the
GeForce 3's AA methods yielded acceptable
frame rates. Although the 2X AA method
noticeably decreases "jaggies", when the Quincunx or
4X AA methods are enabled, the image improvement is
far more dramatic and more visually appealing.
Even though the GeForce
3 Ti 500 cut though Quake 3 like a hot knife through
warm butter, we decided to overclock our card and
see what happened...
|
| Overclocking
The GeForce 3 Ti500 |
|
You can
never have too much of a good thing! |
|
We
once again cranked up the core and memory
clockspeeds to 263MHz. / 565MHz. and ran
Demo001 at the "High Quality" / Maximum settings.
There you have it folks,
while overclocked, our GeForce 3 Ti 500 was able to
attain triple-digit frame rates all the way up to
1600x1200x32. At this high resolution Quake 3
looks absolutely phenomenal. Its time to push things a
bit further though...
| 
