Starting out with an Athlon 650MHz system, we get our first glimpse of the NEXT BIG THING.
The speed comparison between NVIDIA's GeForce 256 DDR, Guillemot's GeForce 256-based Prophet 3D, the Falcon/Guillemot Xentor TNT2 Ultra SE (clocked at 195/235), the Xentor TNT2 Ultra (clocked at 175/183) and the 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 leaves no doubt about the identity of the current shipping OpenGL speed king. The Athlon/GeForce DDR combo are pretty tough
Combined with the Athlon 650MHz CPU, Quake 2 is blazing along at 190 fps in 640 x 480. Even in Crusher at 1600 x 1200, the speedometer pegs at over 48 fps. Quake 3 Test climbs in at 111 fps in "Normal" and over 60 fps at the Sharky Extreme High Quality (SEHQ) setting of Tri-Linear Filtered, 32-bit color, 1024 x 768 resolution madness! The GeForce 256 does receive a benefit from OpenGL's automatic utilization of the hardware T & L but has an increase in speed attributable to the quad 64-bit pipeline architecture as well.
But what about D3D?