The Giga-Battle Part 2

The Giga Test Systems

NVIDIA's New Driver 5.08

In this test we used NVIDIA's new pre-release driver rev. 5.08, as available at www.reactorcritical.com . This driver vastly enhances GeForce's OpenGL-performance on all platforms and it removes the 'fast writes ' bug of the driver rev. 3.68. At the same time the 5.08-driver reduces Direct3D-performance though. I still decided to use it, because it shows a lot better performance on non-Intel platforms than previous ones. The frame rates of Quake 3 Arena, Quake 2 and SPECviewperf are up to 5% higher than before; the frame rates in Expendable and Unreal Tournament D3D are reduced however.

Office Application Performance Under Windows98SE

BAPCo's Sysmark2000 has become the de-facto standard for office application benchmarking. You can see it, Giga-Athlon does not score as high as Giga-Pentium III, but it's not too far behind. Athlon on KX133 is slightly faster than on Irongate with enabled SuperBypass. The Giga-Pentium III results are more interesting. They show once more that nothing can beat the good old Intel 440BX chipset even with Giga-Coppermine. VIA's Apollo Pro 133A is just as fast as Intel's i820 using the fast PC800 RDRAM, but both are far behind BX. i840 is rather close to BX, but it can't quite reach it. It's remarkable however, that i840 with PC600 RDRAM is still scoring better than i820 or Apollo Pro 133A.