3DMark Benchmarks

The CPU 3DMark tests the processor's ability to handle the first leg of the 3D pipeline - transformation and lighting operations. The Athlon was well-anticipated to be a dominant factor in 3D gaming, and in this it delivers. In this test, it's clear that AMD's 3DNow! can stand toe to toe with Intel's SSE instruction set. While SSE provides a greater raw gain for the P3, the Athlon's superior architecture propels it well past its Pentium competitor.

This is the first test where the P3 catches up with the Athlon. The significance however, is in the similarity of scores. This test pushes large amounts of textures through the bus, using main memory for texture storage. From this test, we can see that AMD finally has a good AGP implementation! AGP 2x's maximum tranfer rate of 528MB/s will soon be doubled with the delivery of 4X AGP, and the Athlon will be well-poised to take advantage of the new graphics standard with its super-high bandwidth architecture.

Look at those 6000+ scores! The Athlon provides the muscle to push the TNT2 3D accelerator past a new threshold. The interested numbers however, are G400 performance. This is one 3D accelerator that has been known to be quite CPU limited. In our Millennium G400 review, you can see that upping the CPU from a Celeron 400 to a Pentium III 500 provided a big jump in performance for the G400. Taking this a step further, we can see that at all but the highest color depths and resolutions, the Athlon is powerful enough to take this 125/166MHz card and propel it to becoming a competitive product against "speed-optimized" cards such as the TNT2 Ultra. Just imagine how a G400 Max would perform!