Quake III Arena
Quake III has long been the realm of the Pentium 4, and the P4's dominance in Q3 has often been attributed to its high memory bandwidth. Let's see if that theory holds up.

Give the Pentium 4 PC133 memory, and it starts to look pretty ordinary in Q3A, as the 845 results show. The P4X266, meanwhile, is right up there with the 850 yet again.

Serious Sam
Serious Sam, another OpenGL-based first-person shooter, gives us a different look at its performance test by allowing us to plot the frame rates over time. Here's how they compare:

As in Quake III, the P4X266 is just below the 850, while the 845 runs over 10 frames per second slower.

3DMark 2001
3DMark's DirectX 8-based tests stress a system in some different ways. Most scenes are absolutely loaded with triangles, and advanced graphics features, including AGP performance, are on prominent display.

The P4X266 manages to win this one outright, besting the RDRAM-based 850 system. The performance penalty with the 845 and PC133 SDRAM is severe—over 500 points in 3DMark.