AMD Athlon 850

The Pentium III, with it's full speed on-die L2 cache has always held the lead over the Athlon under Quake III with the GeForce. On a clock for clock basis the Pentium III does come out on top of the Athlon, but when you compare the price to performance ratio of the Pentium III 800 (provided that you could get your hands on one) to that of the Athlon 800 or 850, you end up with the latter two offering the most bang for your buck.

It is interesting to note the effect of chipsets in the above chart. By enabling SuperBypass on the AMD 750 chipset, the performance of the Athlon 850 system immediately jumped from 10th place below the Pentium III 667 to fourth place just 0.2 fps slower than the Pentium III 733. But if you consider that the difference between the 2nd place spot of 119 fps and the 10th place spot of 112 fps is just 6%, it isn't that big of a deal.

When the Athlon was originally released it held a huge performance advantage over the competing Pentium III, but with the newer Pentium III's the difference on a clock for clock basis is in favor of Intel. For gamers, the decision should come down to a question of which is cheaper, and in that respect, the Athlon once again takes the win.

The beauty of the DDR GeForce we used in our test bed is that 60 fps at 1024 x 768 x 32 in Quake III is possible with almost any CPU because of the combination of DDR SGRAM and the GeForce's hardware T&L engine.