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This one
needs no introduction. Quake
3 Arena, the perennial 3D Gaming
benchmark.
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| More
Pentium 4 Gaming Benchmarks |
| A
Frame Rate Shoot Out Versus AMD's 1.33
T-Bird |
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There is
no doubt about it, if you play Q3 Arena there is no
faster processor than the Pentium 4. As we've
said in the past, Q3 is heavily memory bandwidth
intensive. Here at every clock speed down to
1.5GHz., the Athlon is beaten handily.
Dronez:
We
ran the new Dronez
benchmark, also an OpenGL based gaming engine, with
the "GeForce2 Bump" setting.
Although Dronez, has the capability to take
advantage of the GeForce3's Programmable GPU
features and nFiniteFX engine, this setting runs
within the capabilities of a GeForce2 only.
For this review we felt this was the best way to run
this test since most users, at the time of this
article, don't have a GeForce3 to make their own
assessments with.
Once
again, the Pentium 4 1.7GHz. processor man-handles
the Athlon at 1.33GHz. Again, Dronez really
taxes memory and bus bandwidth and clearly the P4's
strong suit is shown here as well. We are also
taking a look at Aquanox
as possible candidate for future testing. It
may be very interesting to see how the competitors
stack up in these next generation gaming engines.
We've
shown you Intel's next generation in clock speed for
the Pentium 4. In addition, we given you a
taste of things to come with our 1.9GHz.
tests. For the HotHardware staff, the Intel
Pentium 4 has some mixed emotions attached to
it. On the average "Business User's"
desktop, it has a hard time competing with AMD's top
of the line, at least in legacy applications.
Future more multi-task demanding desktop
productivity and content creation software could
exercise the P4 a bit more and also utilize SSE2
instructions, which should definitely close the gap
significantly. However, for now it seems like
the P4 is lagging in this segment.
On
the other hand, we are continually impressed with
some very specific data points like the Pentium 4's
high end gaming performance, which gives us a hint
that there is a real screamer of an engine under the
hood that is just waiting to get on the right race
track. That track being future software that
is compiled and written to take advantage of the new
P4 micro-architecture. We need to remember
that the P4 is competing with AMD on legacy code
that was not written to take advantage of its
strengths specifically, like all X86 processor in
the past and even the Pentium III. As the
Pentium 4 platform matures along with a wealth of PC
software that needs to grow with it, we expect to
see additional gains from the Pentium 4.
Furthermore, it really feels like Intel is just
getting warmed up with respect to clock speed but
only time will tell with that.
Finally,
the Pentium 4 has taken a much needed turn towards
being more economical. We've been told that
prices for the 1.7GHz. P4 in quantities of 1,000
pieces, will start at $352. Lower clock speed
P4s will obviously be less. Although you may
not see this kind of pricing in the retail channel
yet, that day will come
soon.
Got
something meaningful to say or do you just want to
flap your gums?
Get into the Hot Hardware Conference Room today!
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