AMD Athlon

idSoftware's Quake 3 Arena Test is another wonderful CPU test because it offers four built in image quality settings which stress the CPU in different ways.  The Fastest and Fast settings allow the CPU to take over and push the graphics card to its limits at lower resolutions, the Normal setting provides for a simulation of average gameplay, and the High setting gives us an indication of the limits of the graphics card.

The fastest image quality setting gives us an indication of what the CPU is capable of doing, and as you can tell from the below chart, as the only processor breaking the 100 fps barrier, the Athlon 600 and 650 bring gamers back to the AMD name.  Only a 700MHz Pentium III could potentially threaten the 600MHz Athlon, and for a gamer that can't afford the 600, the Athlon 500 should do just fine and offer performance comparable to that of at least a Pentium III 600 if not greater.

The results of the benchmarks at the fast image quality setting almost mirror those run at the fastest setting, although the gap between the Athlon 600 and the Pentium III 650 does begin to close as the TNT2 slowly exhibits fill rate limited behavior.