Again, in Q3test 1.05, the Athlon 600 enjoys a sizable lead over the Pentium III 560. We should remind users that the timedemo utility in Q3test 1.05 is not fully functional, and does little more than provide repeatable results. In other words, the numbers themselves are not indicative of true framerates, but can be used reliably as a comparative tool.

John Carmack of id software has this to say about the K7:

AMD K7 cpus are very fast.

The bottom line is that I feel comfortable standing behind the statement that the K7 is faster than the PIII. I will have to wait for some stuff to come out of NDA to provide a more detailed technical analysis.

Architectural cleverness is all well and good, but if AMD can't keep the clock speed up with intel, they will still fall behind. A 700 mhz PIII would probably find a lot of applications (especially integer apps) where it would outperform a 600 mhz K7.

The next release of Q3test (scheduled for the weekend of July 17-18) should provide a fixed timedemo function, as well as a new single-player map and some additional weapons. Check back at FiringSquad for more info on Athlon benchmarks for Q3TEST!