3DNow! Enabled 3D Adapters - Which solution offers the best performance?

Features
By published

Tested Environment

CPU

  • AMD-K6-2 400 MHz
  • AMD-K6 III 450 MHz

Motherboard

  • ASUS P5A Revision 1.04 (512 kB cache)
  • BIOS Revision 1007
  • AGP Driver Version 1.60

Memory

  • 128 MB PC-100 SDRAM

Hard Disk

  • Western Digital AC418000-00DW (18 MAR 99)

Audio

  • Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound MX300
  • Driver Version 1.20b

Operating System

  • Windows 98
  • DirectX 6.1eng

Video Adapter(s)

  • 3Dfx Voodoo3 = Driver date 4-27-99 (Quake III Compatible driver), MiniGL version 1.48
  • ATI Rage 128 = Driver date 5-25-99
  • Matrox G400 MAX = Driver date 5-21-99
  • Nvidia TNT2 = Diamond Multimedia Viper V770 Ultra, Driver date 6-4-99
  • S3 Savage 4 = Diamond Multimedia Stealth III S540, Driver date 5-26-99

Games

Expendable Demo

  • triple buffering enabled
  • highest quality for all video settings
  • audio disabled (however a sound card must be present to run)
  • movies disabled
  • vsync sync to refresh disabled

Quake II 3DNow! version 3.20

  • CD Audio disabled (+set cd_nocd 1)
  • Audio disabled (+set s_initsound 0)
  • Joystick disabled (+set in_initjoy 0)
  • vsync sync to refresh disabled

You may be surprised that you won't find different clock speeds of the graphic chips in the results. The reason is quite simple. Expendable as well as the Quake2 Crusher-demo are heavily depending upon the CPU. In case of the K6-2 and K6-3 there's no difference in the frame rate results of those benchmarks between e.g. a Voodoo3 at 143 MHz or at 200 MHz. You would find differences in some today meaningless benchmarks as Forsaken, Incoming or Quake2-demo1. The tests we did were targeted to the high-end gamer, who is using top games and who considers playing online. In both cases the CPU is working very hard, which is why we chose benchmarks that are tough on the CPU, thus supplying you with realistic and useful numbers.