Desktop CPU Comparison - September 99

3D Gaming Performance

Half Life was an incredible first person shooter, the single player game was arguably one of the best of its kind in terms of graphics, plot, and from the benchmarking perspective, a CPU stressor.  Two factors are very important to obtaining a high performing system under Half Life, a fast L2 cache and a powerful FPU, both of which the Athlon has and the above graph illustrates that quite nicely.

Clock for clock the Celeron is about as fast as the Pentium II/III, making gaming environments one of the many arenas in which there is virtually no noticeable difference between the Celeron and the Pentium II/III.  The reason behind this is simple, the Celeron uses the same floating point unit as the Pentium II/III and coupled with the faster (albeit smaller) L2 cache on the Celeron, the performance difference between the two processors is reduced to minimal at best. 

The K6-2 is brought down hard by its weaker FPU and limited L2 cache frequency, the K6-III does somewhat better but it is still beat out clock for clock by the Pentium II/III and the Celeron, making the K6-2/3 not the ideal gaming platform for the hardcore gamer.  At the same time, keep in mind that there are areas where the K6-2/3 performs beautifully in, and if you are the type of user that either doesn't play 3D games or rarely plays games at all, then the K6-2/3 may end up as a decent alternative. 

The crusher.dm2 demo for Quake 2 is an excellent performance measurement tool as it stresses the L2 cache/memory subsystems, your graphics card and of course your CPU heavily.  The results under crusher are very similar to those from the Half Life test with the Celeron making it very difficult for a user to discern between itself and the Pentium II/III.  

The K6-2/3 does much better in this benchmark primarily because of the 3DNow! optimizations included with the AMD released patch for Quake 2.  As far as raw power is concerned, the K6-III does a nice job of showing off its muscle with a score on the heels of the Pentium III 450, unfortunately the crusher.dm2 benchmark isn't representative of gameplay in all games across the board.