PIII almost beats PIV 1.4

[bigsapo]

This is very wierd. My computer is a PIII 1ghz with an Intel mobo with 256 pc133, sb live and a v3 2000 @ 170mhz and win98se. In q3 version 1.30 with high quality (on 16 bit color) i get 80 fps. One of my friend's PIV 1.4 with an sb live, 256 pc800, and Intel mobo for PIV and a gf2mx and win xp pro. He gets 87 fps. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!!!!!!!!?????????

Why does my friend get so low?

I have another friend who has an athlon 1.33, 256 pc133, sb live, gf2 pro, and an epox kt133a mobo but i still have to confirm his score at the same settings.

A few weeks ago, my friend that owns the athlon let me borrow his gf2 pro. i ran benchmarks in quake v. 1.11, 1024*768 32bit everything on max with trilinear filtering. With the athlon my friend gets 120 fps and i get 110 with my PIII 1ghz.

Any ideas to why my computer is so fast or why my friends' computers are so slow? Would this kind of performance difference between my PIII and the athlon and PIV be that small? Is my computer on par with similar systems?

[dead_eye]

It's the graphics card probably. You might have programs running in the background and/or your friend's BIOS might have the card set to agp 2x or 1x and you to 4x. Your friend might also have sdram like you.

[HAL9000]

The GeForce2 MX is probably what is holding him back. Throw in a GF Pro or a Radeon and watch it pick up.

[Xayd]

There's very little difference if any between the P3 floating point and the P4, hence they don't perform that much better in games.

[fade2black]

I agree more with the last statement by Xayd. The P4 is a lot of hype. I can go on for quite a while about why the P4 is nothing to get excited about. But I will spare everyone, including my tired hands, the long rant.

I don't know how many of you recall how much Intel struggled with the production of P3's above 1 GHz. (P3 1.13 GHz recalls, very limited supply, etc.) Lets just say that Intel in part designed the P4 so that they can crank up the MHz err GHz more easily and then flaunt it in the mass market. However, the p4 design reduces the amout of work done in each cpu cycle so the cycles can be done faster (higher GHz). But, it takes more cycles to do the same computation, and hence more time to do the same amount of work. The trick is to speed the cycles up enough so that in the end the actual time per calculation is less. Also, the P4 is designed around significantly different operational ideas than those of previous processors. As a result, software that has been written and compiled with the previous processors in mind, will not run as efficiently on the P4. Eventually programs may become more optimized to take advantage of the benefits that the P4 architecture provides.

This is very simply put why your 1 GHz P3 is "uncomfortably" close to your friends 1.4 GHz P4.

[glc]

There is much more to game performance than raw frame rates. Can you SEE the difference in anything over about 50fps?

[bigsapo]

thanks

but what about the athlon?