VIA's P4X266: The Pentium 4 gets DDR

3D Gaming Performance

The final area of performance measurement is in a few 3D gaming tests using present day engines as well as future engines.

Quake III Arena has always been a strongpoint for the Pentium 4, and we may have just found out why.  This is the only test in which the i850 exerts a large lead over the P4X266, in this case a 16% lead.  The added bandwidth could very well be used by the Pentium 4's hardware prefetch indicating that a large portion of why the Pentium 4 does so well in Quake III Arena is because of its hardware prefetch. 

At higher resolutions this performance delta will shrink a bit as the system becomes more bottlenecked by your video card; it's simply interesting to point out.

Under DroneZ we see another somewhat large performance advantage, this time of around 8%. 

AquaMark is a good example of what happens in a benchmark when performance is limited by the graphics card.  All of the performance deltas disappear in the AquaMark test, leaving the P4X266 and i850 on level ground about 18% higher than where the i845 stands.