3D Game Benchmark Results - Quake 2 Demo 1

Q2 shows a very different picture to the previous game benchmarks. TNT looks very good indeed, scoring higher than Voodoo2 at 800x600. Now I would almost have called TNT the `Voodoo2-Killer' if the performance of TNT wouldn't drop extremely when using a slower CPU as the Celeron 266. With this CPU TNT is certainly the wrong choice for Quake2, unless you only care about 1024x768 resolution rather than frame rates above 40 fps.

Running demo1.dm2 as a benchmark in Quake 2 brings up one serious question in case of Savage3D. The scored fps raise continuously with the number of test runs, probably because the dynamic textures needed in the run are slowly but surely all available from the cache memory. When we play Quake 2 we hardly ever run the same way twice, so that the results scored with Savage3D are probably falsely high. Savage3D has certainly an obvious lead over Banshee in high resolutions as already seen in the other games. However, the Quake 2 image quality produced by Savage3D is the worst of the tested cards as well. Matrox runs Quake 2 on the G200 with a D3D wrapper for the time being. Once the full OpenGL ICD it available, G200 should score quite a bit better. I am expecting numbers as seen in Incoming. Nevertheless the image quality displayed by G200 is worlds apart from all the other cards in the test.