Quake 3 Arena Demo001
The story looks very different when we look at those results here. Quake 3 Arena is able to take great advantage of Pentium 4's high memory throughput. This is why the overclocked Pentium 4 at 1.61 GHz and 460 MHz Rambus clock performs almost as well as the Pentium 4 at 1.73 GHz. Anyways, if Quake 3 Arena is really important to you, Pentium 4 might be worth its money.
Quake 3 Arena NV15Demo
The lead of Pentium 4 is reduced but not lost when it's running the complex NVIDIA NV15-level. The processor needs to compute a whole lot of FP-stuff and so far Quake 3 doesn't take any advantage of SSE2. Still, Pentium 4 is looking good.
