Intel Pentium 4 1.4GHz & 1.5GHz

In spite of the 12% lead the 1.5GHz Pentium 4 took in the Quake III Arena benchmarks, the 1.2GHz Athlon on the AMD 760 platform manages to take a 5% lead over the 1.5GHz P4. This is the perfect example of how the Pentium 4 needs a higher clock speed in order to distance itself from the competition. At clock speeds close to that of the Athlon, without any SSE2 specific optimizations, the Pentium 4 will almost always come out under the Athlon.

We pointed out in an earlier article that Intel will be releasing a 1.3GHz Pentium 4 early next year. Judging by the performance we see here, you can expect a 1.3GHz Pentium 4 to perform barely faster than a Pentium III clocked at 1GHz.

Once again, as the resolution reaches a certain level, the graphics card becomes the limiting factor. At this point, regardless of your CPU, you're not going to be able to get any more performance out of your system.