Performance - 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.

I remember doing a review about a year ago in which I said 'doing 80 frames per second in 1600x1200 is excellent'. Nowadays we do 200 frames per second in that mode. Totally useless for Quake III but it surely does demonstrate the increase in performance over the past 12 months.