Introduction

Feeding the hungry masses

Almost six months have passed since we released our last Quake 3 Video Card Shootout. Even then, the last one was actually part 2 in the series. The first shootout covered the performance given in Quake 3 by various video cards. Popular demand brought forth the second part not too much later, because we were asked to do the same kind of shootout using non-reference drivers.

At last, it has come to pass. People have been clamoring for another video shootout to look at the current crop of video cards. Of course, the six months' time since the last shootout has yielded quite a few interesting developments in the video card sector.

In the blue corner….

This time around, we're going to take a look at some of the latest video card offerings from various manufacturers:

3dfx Voodoo5 5500

ATI Radeon 64 MB

NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra

NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS

We stuck to reference drivers for these cards. Since most of the requests made were to use a relatively buff CPU, we tested these cards out on both a PIII 1 GHz and an Athlon 1 GHz. We should probably see some interesting numbers, to say the least! Now we'll take a peek at what the rest of our test system components were before hopping into the numbers. Note that this article is not meant to compare video performance between the Pentium 3 and the Athlon. The Pentium 3 is running at a 7.5 multiplier and 133MHz bus, while the Athlon is running at a 10 multiplier and 100MHz front-side bus. This difference will yield some performance difference, as it changes some other variables (memory speeds, component bus speeds, etc.)