New CPUs from AMD and Intel

3D Gaming Benchmark Scores - 3DWinbench99

You know that I don't think much of 3DWinbench as a tool to evaluate graphics cards performance, but I do consider it as one of the better CPU-benchmarks indeed. Due to the fact that it's using DirectX's transform and lighting engine, it's automatically 3DNow! as well as SSE- optimized when using DirectX 6.1 or higher. It's still hard to say how much of a good optimizing job was, but it's at least some way of comparing 3DNow! to SSE.

I do admit that choosing NVIDIA's RIVA TNT may not have been a too wise decision for this benchmark. The 1.06 driver is certainly not 3Dnow!-optimized, which makes K6-3 fall behind. Pentium III is not scoring a whole lot better than Pentium II and this should be some kind of sign to all of you who expect a major improvement in 3D gameplay with Pentium III.

Looking at the transform & lighting performance on its own shows a bit of a different picture:

Here you can see a pretty nice comparison of 3DNow! and SSE. I don't even know if AMD was ever aware of it, but until the days of Pentium III, K6-2 was the performance leader in this benchmark. Now times have changed, Pentium III smokes the whole competition. However, what is the value of this benchmark? It's actually pretty worthless, because you can see that the overall 3DWinbench score is hardly influenced by it. Transform and lighting is just one part of the complete rendering process and improving this by even 100% doesn't make a game run faster by more than maybe 10%. Maybe this benchmark is for the message boards, where one idiot shouts at another because he has better numbers. I'm sure that my message board and the lovely people on it will love that benchmark as well.