Desktop CPU Comparison - September 99

Looking for a more current benchmark?  idSoftware's Quake 3 Test is a wonderful benchmark for measuring CPU performance.  The above test, conducted at the 'Fastest' video mode (as to eliminate the video card as a possible bottleneck) illustrates the Athlon dominating yet again, this time at the level of around a Pentium III 700+.  We all know the story by now, the Celeron and Pentium II/III are within a decent distance from each other, albeit not great enough to justify the added cost of the latter and the K6-2/3 brings up the rear due to the heavy FPU dependency of the game. 

One thing that you may want to note is that even though some processors are faster than other in this test, they are all quite playable, but then again, who would want to play at 512 x 384?  Below you'll find more Q3Test benchmarks at a total of four different resolution settings, all described in The Test section of the comparison.