Page 14 - Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena, what a revolution this game was when it got released. Now it has become a standard by itself as solid and respectable benchmark utility for journalists .. The game that everybody knows is naturally Quake III Arena. Seriously, who doesn't own it or at least has played it once ? Q3A is of course an excellent game to use as benchmark. It's an up-to-date game and has new options available to test the card to it's maximum. We used the standard Demo001 timedemo.

We tested the videocard with Quake3 Arena in High Quality mode, 32 Bit colors. Available resolutions we tested where 800x600 up to 1600x1200 with quality settings set to maximum.

Of course, there are far better benchmarks than Quake III, yet this benchmark always places a graphics card in the right perspective performance wise. Yes, we do not need 200 frames per second, but this benchmark scales the difference in graphics cards just so very nice. More modern and Graphics Core demanding games would, of course, produce much lower results.

It's interesting to see that from the moment we started using our own timedemos, the scores dropped bigtime in Quake III. The results are of course by far still excellent. Quake III is getting outdated though and it's end in our benchmark suite is coming closer and closer.

Even with AA and AF enabled at a high level the 5900 remains doing really huge numbers. Anything above 50-60 Frames per second for any game is more than sufficient. The 5950 Ultra performs again the best.