Quake II Demo1

Not again

As many folks now now, Quake II by itself is rarely an effective benchmark of any one component. In many cases it's CPU-limited, and it doesn't take advantage of any of the next-generation features or functions being demonstrated by today's newest 3D games and 3D accelerators, such as large texture sizes, bump mapping, and more.

However, it is a universally recognized benchmark test, and as a benchmark it's a program that virtually everyone has and can test with. The fact that it can be predominantly CPU-limited, makes good use of the FPU (one of the big hyped-up points about the K7) and has excellent 3DNow! support makes it a usable test for our purposes.

The tests were run on a clean install of Quake II 3.20, with no modifications to the default game settings. Vsync is set to off. TNT2 Ultra tests were run on a prerelease TNT2 Ultra with a core/memory clock speed of 150/183MHz. 3DNow! tests with the TNT2 were not taken due to time constraints.

K7 550 Quake II demo1.dm2 Results
Setting	Score (fps)
640x480x8 (software	28.6
640x480x8 (software + 3DNow!)	26.5
640x480x16 (TNT1)	83.2
640x480x16 (TNT1 + 3DNow!)	80.4
640x480x16 (TNT2U)	83.9
800x600x16 (TNT1)	60.4
800x600x16 (TNT1 + 3DNow!)	59.1
800x600x16 (TNT2U)	80.5
1024x768x16 (TNT2U)	62.5
P3 500 Demo1 results with non-Ultra TNT2
800x600x16 (TNT2 140/166)	92.4
1024x768x16 (TNT2 140/166)	64.7

Demo1 Analysis

If there's one thing that's ultimately clear from these benchmark numbers, it's that the K7's pure FPU is finally strong enough to stand its ground. Of course, 3DNow! extensions don't really doing any good at all on the less-than optimized Nvidia drivers for TNT/TNT2. As a side note, by now Nvidia will have released their enhanced AMD display drivers, offering greatly enhanced performance for gamers who want more choice for their 3D games than just 3dfx.

In each of these cases however, the numbers are quite mild, especially compared to the 92.4 fps displayed by the Elsa Erazor III at a lower-clocked 140/166MHz at 640x480x16 on a Pentium III 500. Against the K6-3 550, 800x600x16 yields an 8 fps, or 11% improvement. However, as you can see, performance of the K7 is closer to that of a Celeron 366 than any Pentium III.