A little Quake3 benchmarking

As I said before, the new Quake 3 Arena Test Demo is out, so if you don’t have q3test v1.08 — don’t bother getting it. The v1.08 demo however, is useful in the the sense that it basically has 4 graphic modes: fastest, fast, normal, and high quality. You can use just about any resolution with any mode to benchmark, but I’m just going to stick with 800×600 resolution with the various graphic quality modes.

How to do it

Open up your Q3test, and go to the system menu. From there select “graphic options.” Set your mode to “fastest” and apply changes. Now hit the tilde ~ key. You should be at the console command line now. Type “timedemo 1″ and hit enter. Then type “demo q3demo1.dm3″ and hold on. The demo is pretty small and doesn’t take very long at all to finish. Repeat two more times and take your best score. Then go back to graphic options and select “fast” and apply changes. Run the demo three times again taking your best score. Do the same for “normal” and “high quality” running them three times each and recording all your scores.

Benchmarking Complete, have a nice day

So to conclude, we first ran CPUmark 99 v1.0, then we ran 3DMark 99 MAX. After we did some Quake2 and Quake3 testing. With all this data, we should now have a pretty good idea of where our game rigs stand and how hard we can push them. Don’t be surprised if you go back and try this a bunch more times, tweaking here and there trying to get the best score possible.

So how did I do? Here’s the skinny