Benchmarks: 18 Rigorous Tests
| OpenGL Performance | Quake 3 Arena "Demo 1" and "NV15 Demo" |
| Direct3D Performance | 3D Mark 2000 and 3D Mark 2001 |
| 3D Rendering | Newtek Lightwave 7b |
| 3D Rendering | SPECviewperf "Lightscape" |
| MP3 Audio Encoding | Lame MP3 Encoder |
| MPEG-2 Video Encoding | Pinnacle Studio 7 |
| MPEG-4 Video Encoding | Flask Mpeg 0.6 and DivX codec 4.02 |
| Office Performance | Sysmark 2001 |
| Archiving | WinACE 2.04 |
| Compiling Linux Kernel | Suse Linux 7.3 (Kernel 2.4.13) |
| SiSoft Sandra 2001 | CPU and Multimedia Bench |
We performed a total of 18 different benchmark tests (the same used in the last comparison ) in order to obtain the most complete, the most well-balanced view of how the processors perform, only this time the focus was on the Athlon XP 1900+. We continued to determine OpenGL performance using four different Quake tests - Direct3D performance from the DirectX package is determined using the 3D Mark 2000 (based on DirectX 7) and the 3D Mark 2001 (based on DirectX 8).
The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks represent a comprehensive testing scenario - the Lame MP3 Encoder was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into "MPEG-1 Layer 3 Format." Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Flask Mpeg and DivX.
A new addition to our benchmark suite is encoding an MPEG-2 file within a project by using "Pinnacle Studio 7" video editing software.
