Page 15 - Quake III Arena

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 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.

The results are of course by far sufficient. it's funny to see though what an impact switching to a custom timedemo had on overall performance. Quake III is getting outdated though and in all honesty we made the time-demo quite extreme. Still from 8x6 towards 16x12 the game is playable all the way.

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