Quake III Arena tests OpenGL performance through the scientific use of a rail gun and gibbed body bits. It uses advanced features such as curved surfaces and high-polygon models to bring your video card to its knees. V-sync was disabled in all tests.
Normal mode tests 16-bit performance.
In normal mode, the ATI card surprised us by pulling ahead of the Voodoo5 at 640x480 and 800x600. This can be attributed to the fact that Apple's OpenGL is written specifically with ATI's architecture in mind. At 1024x768, the ATI runs into a fillrate barrier as the Voodoo5 keeps up full steam all the way to 1280x1024. The Voodoo5 proves its strength by losing only 1.3fps between 640x480 and 1280x1024, while the Rage 128 Pro loses over twenty fps. We did not benchmark at 1600x1200 due to the Voodoo5 failing to run at that resolution. 3dfx tells us that the shipping drivers will fix the problem.