Quake III Arena
Now we enter the 3D gaming realm, which isn't likely to be kind to the PIII. Memory and bus bandwidth are the orders of the day here, as are driver optimizations for SIMD extensions like SSE, 3DNow!, and SSE2. Can the PIII pull out a surprise win in Quake III?

Not a chance. It's safe to say the older PIII and its platform are simply outclassed here. Quake III is notoriously bandwidth-hungry.

Serious Sam
Let's try another OpenGL-based first person shooter for good measure. Serious Sam allows us to plot performance over time, so we can see how the different processors handle different portions of the game demo we're timing. In this case, we've used five-second intervals. The end result looks like so:

You'll notice immediately how the lines for the PIII and Athlon are shaped similarly, while the P4 follows its own path. The bigger dips in the P4's lines are almost to be expected from a CPU with such deep pipelines; the P4's performance is rather peaky in character.

The 1.2GHz PIII performs a little better overall than the 1.4GHz P4, but it's slower than everything else. The Athlons are definitely the winners here.

3DMark 2001
Now let's look at DirectX 8.0 3D gaming, where the Pentium III will spend a lot of time, since it's the CPU (at 733MHz or so) going into Microsoft's Xbox, along with a graphics chip very similar to our test systems' GeForce3.

Once again, the PIII is outclassed, although it did manage to break the 5000 mark, which isn't too bad. I'd have to say Intel stole the Xbox contract away from AMD on price, not performance, though.

Regular readers may notice that the Pentium 4 won back the 3DMark crown from AMD, just weeks after AMD captured it from Intel. NVIDIA's new Pentium 4-optimized 12.41 video drivers are the reason why the P4 was able to take back the crown.