Quake 3 Arena Under Windows 2000
Pentium 4 was able to beat Athlon quite well in Quake 3 under Windows 98. This is mainly due to the fact that Quake 3 is extremely dependent on memory bandwidth, which you can easily see when you benchmark your own system with Q3A and make minor changes to your memory timings. Let's see if there's any difference under Windows 2000.
Surprisingly enough, Athlon scores a lot better under Windows 2000, while Pentium 4 stays where it was at under Windows 98. Athlon is still not able to beat Pentium 4, even when it is overclocked to 1466/133 MHz. You can see that there is only a tiny difference in frame rate between Athlon 1200/133, 1400/133 and 1466/133. I consider this behavior to be the result of a clear bandwidth problem. I doubt that even an Athlon at 1.6 GHz on AMD760 could reach the results of Pentium 4 at 1.5 GHz. Athlon is suffering from either memory or bus bandwidth restrictions and Pentium 4 can take advantage of its high data bandwidths once more.
