Quake III Team Arena OpenGL gaming
The Team Arena expansion pack for Quake III presents much more of a challenge for a fast system than the original game. With more polygons and larger outdoor areas, it doesn't run nearly as fast.

The Pentium 4's performance in Quake continues to impress. The Athlon is simply outclassed here—one of the few places that's even remotely the case.

Serious Sam OpenGL gaming
A newcomer to our test suite is Serious Sam, a very cool game developed by a group of guys in Croatia. The 3D graphics engine in this game is second to none, and it's a heckuva lot of fun, too. Serious Sam uses OpenGL to generate its eye candy, and its benchmarking functions make things easy for us.

Unlike that other OpenGL 3D shooter, Serious Sam runs faster on an Athlon. It's close, though.

Expendable Direct3D gaming
Now to a Direct3D test. Let me interject here that there are entirely too few quality Direct3D games with decent benchmarking functions. Rage's third-person shoot 'em up will do, even if it is a little old.

The Pentium 4 has some trouble keeping up here. It's almost a mirror image of the Quake III results.