Page 13 - Quake III
Performance - 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 a custom Guru3D 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.
Quake III Arena | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
Radeon 9600 256 | 165 | 81 | 52 | 35 |
Radeon 9600 Pro | 173 | 113 | 72 | 48 |
GeForce FX 5600 Ultra | 197 | 156 | 104 | 73 |
Radeon 9700 Pro | 177 | 166 | 121 | 87 |
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra | 200 | 190 | 153 | 113 |
Wowzers, do you remember framerates of 400 FPS with the standard timedemo's ? Now that we started using a custom timedemo again the framerates collapse, funny huh ? The timedemo used was really extreme though, high polygon count, HQ settings and a lot of simulations players.
4xAA 8xAF | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
Radeon 9600 256 | 94 | 56 | 30 | 22 |
Radeon 9600 Pro | 128 | 63 | 42 | 29 |
GeForce FX 5600 Ultra | 168 | 88 | 55 | 37 |
Radeon 9700 Pro | 174 | 108 | 73 | 51 |
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra | 188 | 142 | 100 | 73 |
As you can see 10x7 is doable with AF and AA enabled. Quake III is getting outdated though. Anything at 50-60 Frames per second for any game is more than sufficient and at 10x7 you will still be able to manage that.