Quake 3 Arena Demo002

Demo002 of Quake3 shows a similar trend as Demo001 - it appears to be a little more CPU limited on my system, but slightly less fillrate intensive. Again KYRO display very healthy scores, and is still at 72FPS in 1024x768x16, things begin to drop off quite rapidly after this resolution though.

Because this demo doesn't appear to be as fillrate limited as Demo001 we get a slightly better performance difference with 32bit in the lower resolutions; however as soon as the resolution exceeds 1024x768 the 16 to 32bit performance differences are exactly the same one Demo001 as they are Demo002. Similarly, we get a slight decrease in performance difference between FSAA and non-FSAA.

Quake 3 Arena Quaver

Well, it's clear to see the texture requirements of the Quaver demo here!

In 16Bit everything appears fine, reasonably in keeping with the other 2 standard Quake3 benchmarks, if a little more intensive; however, as soon as 32bit is enabled its clear to see the performance drop. This isn't just a result of increased memory bandwidth requirements, but increased AGP bus traffic; in 32Bit the quantity of textures, and frame buffer size, as well as the extra space needed for binning, result in pushing the textures over to the system memory, and causes performance to drop. In fact, whilst in 32Bit mode visible 'pauses' occurred, presumably when textures were being swapped from system memory since the local video memory is insufficient. The 32Bit to 16Bit performance comparison table illustrates the point with the performance degradation far higher than the other Quake 3 benchmarks, and rising as high as a 39% performance decrease.

The FSAA comparison table actually shows that in 32Bit and FSAA we regain a little of the lost ground - presumably because the bottleneck is elsewhere in the pipeline (i.e. texture swapping) and we are not quite as fillrate and bandwidth limited.