by Bubba "Masterfung" Wolford

  Benchmarks

Whew! Getting here always seems to take a long time! I think we can all agree that the benchmarks are everyone's favorite part. Before we get into the numbers we want our readers to know about an adjustment we have made to our testing procedures.

In the past we have been using the Papadoc benchmark for flight simulations (Falcon 4.0) but since it still required some user intervention to be assured of any accuracy, we have decided to drop this benchmark in favor one that uses a "controlled, repeatable" test. There exists a modification for Jane's WW2 Fighters that you can download and use with a very minimal amount of setup. The mod is a part of ZD's 3D GameGauge suite of gaming benchmarks.

WW2 Fighters

For every game I have ever played on a 3dfx card, Glide scores have always been better than those of D3D. Early on in the Falcon 4.0 beta, my D3D scores were superior to Glide but when the game shipped, the API's switched and Glide became the superior API. Will 3dfx even continue using the Glide API? Apparently, they are discussing that possibility right now.

So, let's see how well this new Intel 600B Camino with RDRAM performs versus a standard Intel Pentium III 600. Here is the equipment being used for these benchmarks:

System 1:

• Abit BE6 motherboard
• Intel Pentium III 600 MHz
• 128 MB Micron PC133
• Western Digital Expert 18.0 GB UDMA 66 7200 RPM Hard drive
• 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 (v1.02.18) and Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 Ultra (v4.02)
• Diamond MX300 Sound Card
• Kenwood 52X Multi-beam CDROM
• 3Com 10/100 3C905B NIC
• Windows 98 Second Edition

System 2:

• Intel Vancouver VC820 Camino motherboard
• Intel Pentium III 600B
• 128 MB RAMBUS RDRAM PC800
• Western Digital Expert 9.1 GB UDMA 66 7200 RPM Hard drive
• 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 (v1.02.18) and Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 Ultra (v4.02)
• Toshiba 6X DVD
• Integrated Crystal Audio system
• Integrated Intel 10/100 Ethernet NIC
• Windows 98 Second Edition

Click to continue

The Games

Okay, we are now ready to show you all the benchmarks. Let's start with Jane's WW2 Fighters. I tested WW2 Fighters using all the supported API's First, I ran D3D. These are the scores from the 3D GameGauge benchmark:

WW2 Fighters: D3d

We can see that the 600B holds a small lead over the i440BX 600 on the 100 MHz bus. Since both processors are running at the same speed, the increases might be attributed to the increased bus, AGP 4X and/or the fast Rambus PC800 memory.

After running each in D3D, I decided to see how these systems ran on OpenGL. Clearly, D3D is superior to OpenGL as a faster API in WW2 Fighters. Look and see:

WW2 Fighters: OpenGL

Whoa! One piece of advice, don't run this game in OpenGL!

Go to Part V.