3D Games
In old tradition we start with Quake 3 and Demo001 at 640x480 and high-color. It's the only 'benchmarkable' 3D game right now that shows Pentium 4 in a good light. Athlon 1333 remains behind Pentium 4 1.5 GHz. However, who plays Q3A at 640x480 and considers 188 fps as too little for game play?
At the reasonable resolution of 1024x768 and true-color the story changes. The 3D-card (we used a NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra card) becomes the bottleneck, making all contestants perform alike. Even slower processors would reach the same scores. This should make you wonder if you indeed require a great P4-box with mediocre 3D-card to play the next games.
The polygon-rich NV15-demo shows that Pentium 4 is not necessarily blazing-fast in Quake3. Athlon 1333 is able to beat Pentium 4 1.5 GHz in this demo, though only slightly.
At the higher resolution and true-color the picture hardly changes. All processors are performing pretty much alike, with Athlon 1333 slightly, but meaninglessly beating Pentium 4 1.5 GHz.
