GeForce3 Performance

Benchmarks

Quake 3 Arena

Id's Quake 3 Arena may be a cult game, but dating back to 1999 it has become a bit old these days. Unless highest screen resolutions and true color are required, every upper-class 3D-card is today able to provide respectable frame rates and good quality in this game. Still, Quake 3 Arena remains one of the most important tests that a 3D-card has to pass.

I don't know if anyone interested in a high-end 3D-card still cares about a screen resolution of only 640x480x16, but I provided benchmark results anyway. At this low resolution the local memory bandwidth doesn't constrain the fill rate of today's 3D-cards, which is why GeForce3 is not really able to show its muscles in comparison to GeForce2 cards. However, you can also see how small the performance impact of the quincunx-FSAA is on GeForce3's frame rate scores.

The polygon and feature rich NV15-level demo shows all cards scoring pretty much on par. 640x480x16 is neither a challenge to GeForce3, nor to GeForce2 or Radeon.