Intel Pentium III 1.2GHz 0.13-micron Tualatin: The Celeron of the Future

3D Gaming Performance - AquaMark & DroneZ

The following two tests were only run at 640 x 480 x 32 since we already illustrated what happens to the CPU performance differences when you crank up the resolution and thus increase dependency on the video card. 

Quake III Arena is a great benchmark, but facing the facts, its still using a two year old engine.  Next year we’ll be graced (hopefully) by id’s Doom 3 engine but until then, there are a number of other games that are much more current which make great benchmarks.  AquaMark is a benchmark made from the upcoming DirectX 8 title, AquaNox.  As a brand new game engine it gives preference to technologies seen in the newer CPUs, such as the Tualatin’s DPL.  The performance benefit the Pentium III 1.2 offers over the Coppermine based 1GHz part is tremendous. 

Our test bed featured a MSI GeForce3 video card, however in order to use this next game engine as a CPU benchmark we resorted to the game’s built-in GeForce2 “Bump” settings in order to remove the GeForce3’s pixel/vertex shaders as performance bottlenecks.  DroneZ is another upcoming game engine this time using the OpenGL API. 

The performance of the Pentium III is not nearly as impressive here; the Athlon is easily able to distance itself from the Tualatin allowing the newcomer to only better the Pentium III 1.0GHz in this test.