AMD Athlon

We used the NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra as the base graphics card for our gaming tests, but as you'll see later on we did repeat some of the tests using both the Voodoo3 3500TV and the Matrox G400 to eliminate any possible optimizations for one processor or another by the video card manufacturer.

While reviewing video cards, coming up with a good real world Direct3D game benchmark is next to impossible.   Shogo never produced representative results and Expendable was too CPU dependent to be a good measure of differences between graphics cards.  Luckily, we're reviewing a CPU here, not a graphics card and Expendable quickly turns into the perfect benchmark.

Expendable on the TNT2 Ultra places the 650MHz Athlon at the top of the benchmarks list, followed closely by the Pentium III at 650MHz and then the Athlon at 600MHz.  A 550MHz Athlon would be a little slower than a Pentium III 600 and a 500MHz Athlon should be around the speed of a Pentium III 550.

If you look down towards the end of the graph you can see where AMD has come from in terms of gaming performance since 1998.

3DMark 99 offers an excellent way to benchmark the type of performance a particular video card will obtain from a CPU using the CPU Geometry Performance test measured in CPU 3DMarks.  Both Athlons were using a Athlon specific 3DNow! DLL in the test, however using an unmodified copy of 3DMark still put both the Athlon 600 and 650 at levels greater than the fastest Pentium III in the test. 

The results speak for themselves, the Athlon has the power to make it to the top of the market, but will it?   Let's move on...