Quake III Arena
Now we're on the Pentium 4's home turf. The P4 just loves Quake III Arena. Can the Palomino enhancements make the Athlon competitive again here?

For once, the 1800+ model name doesn't look like an underestimate. Still, the Athlon XP has moved much closer to the Pentium 4 in Quake III performance. With a little more memory bandwidth than the 760 chipset can provide, the Athlon XP 1800+ might be running neck-and-neck with the Pentium 4 2GHz.

Notice, also, how the 1.2GHz Athlon MP manages a 10 frame per second lead over the 1.2GHz T-bird. The Palomino's enhancements definitely help out here.

Serious Sam
We generally graph results from this OpenGL first-person shooter using a nifty time scale, like so. However, that sort of graph is almost impossible to read with so many processors and speeds, so we've had to resort to averages.

The Athlon XP 1800+ is nearly 20% faster than the 2GHz P4 in this test.

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 field of contenders in 3DMark 2001 lines up about like it does in Quake III Arena. In only the second test so far, the Athlon XP 1800+ comes out slower than the 1.8GHz Pentium 4.