Quake 3: Arena is my all-time favourite for benchmarking video subsystems. Unlike its competitor, the Unreal engine, the Quake 3 engine stresses the raw power of video cards to their max. It also manages to stress the system platform just enough so that it also makes a big difference in the frame rate.

First up is the good-ol' "demo001" that comes with Quake 3: Arena running on our high-end system:

Here, we see the Evil KYRO take on the GeForce2 MX with some convincing force. The two cards exchange places for second place, behing the GeForce2 GTS, with the GeForce2 MX taking the lead in 16-bit rendering and the KYRO in 32-bit rendering. Again, these are signs of the impressive 32-bit performance that tile-based rendering can bring to the KYRO.

We again see the same pattern on our low-end system as we did in our high-end system with the GeForce2 MX and the Evil KYRO exchanging places for second place. We also see again that the Duron 650 processor becomes a bottleneck for all three cards at the lower resolutions.

For this review, I decided to try out a benchmark that stresses the video performance more than the good-ol' "demo001." Quaver is a popular benchmark that is based on the Q3DM9 map, which is a map notorious for its use of enormous textures. It's also an indoor map that feeds the video card slightly more overdraw than the map found in "demo001." Both of these features of Quaver should give the Evil KYRO a slight advantage over the NVIDIA siblings because the KYRO's tile-rendering both reduces memory bandwidth used (i.e. caused by large textures) and eliminates all overdraw.

Well, unfortunately, the change to enormous textures and slightly more overdraw didn't affect the pattern that we witnessed earlier with demo001 much. The GeForce2 MX and the Evil KYRO continues to exchange leads, but with quaver, it looks like the GeForce2 MX's leads have been cut ever so slightly and the KYRO's leads have been increased ever so slightly. This can probably be attributed to the above-mentioned differences that the demo "Quaver" has when compared to "demo001."

Nothing new to see here...

On to: Unreal Tournament Results