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

3D Gaming Performance - Quake III Arena 1.29f

Quake III Arena has been with us for a couple of years now and we will continue to use it until id can provide us with another great benchmark.  John Carmack is truly one of the best developers in the industry that also happens to have a keen eye for hardware; it’s no wonder that all of id’s games happen to be great benchmarks as well.

For this test we’re using the latest 129f patch and the built in FOUR demo.  To run the demo simply enable timedemo mode (“timedemo 1”) and playback demo four (“demo four”)

3D gaming performance has been a strongpoint of the Pentium 4, and it is here that you can see the datedness of the Pentium III core – in spite of the Tualatin’s DPL and higher clock speed. 

However as any AnandTech reader is aware, 3D gaming performance is no longer all about CPU/FPU performance.  In the days of software renders this may have been true, but today the whole package matters.  As the resolution increases, the bottleneck quickly becomes the video card – in this case a GeForce3 – making the difference between two CPUs much less noticeable. 

Just a year ago we were marveling at the fact that we could actually own 1GHz CPUs, and today we’re complaining about how they can’t keep up; you’re lucky that not more of your interests mature this quickly.