The race is about to start, but first let's look at what's under the hood of the machines used for our testing:

Processors: Intel PIII 500MHz overclocked to 620MHz (5*124MHz) & Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz.

Memory: 256MB PC133 RAM

Motherboard: ASUS P3B-F

Hard Drive: Western Digital 13 GB & 5.1 GB

Sound Card: Creative Labs SB Live! Value

Windows 98 SE with DirectX 7

The following video cards were used with the following sets of drivers:

Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 32MB SDR with Leadtek's 3.53 based drivers (120/166)

Diamond Viper V770 Ultra 32MB with NVIDIA's 3.53 reference Detonator drivers (150/175)

Now let's get on to the testing!

Quake III: Arena Test tests OpenGL performance and makes use of the GeForce's hardware T&L. In order to test the Normal settings for Quake 3, we set the Graphics Options to Normal and changed only the resolution for each different test. V-sync was disabled.

As we can see, the GeForce definitely provides a performance increase over the TNT2 Ultra in the T&L enabled Quake 3: Arena. Performance ranged from a 45% increase at low resolutions with the Pentium III 620MHz to about a 20% increase on both platforms at 1280x1024. Other than that, the numbers speak for themselves.

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