Quake 3: Arena

Quake 3 is a bevy of high polygon count characters, and high resolution textures, which makes this benchmark perfect for comparing OpenGL performance on today's video cards. Since the v1.25 point release for Q3A make all previous demo benchmarks unusable, we opted to use the pap1.25 benchmark courtesy of PlanetQuake. We set all options to their highest settings (only we used bilinear filtering instead of trilinear).

Both cards run extremely fast at the low resolution of 640x480, regardless of color depth.

FPS falls, but still playable on both cards at either color depth.

This is the behemoth of all resolutions, and can tax a video card to the max. For some reason the V5 5500 PCI threw out some weird visual disruption @16bit that was most likely due to drives, but I couldn't tell for sure as 32bit ran fine.

Conclusion

As of right now the V5 5500 PCI is the fastest PCI video card there is (and don't forget about the FSAA and host of other nifty features the T-Buffer has to offer), and I don't see Nvidia or ATI really entering that market anytime soon. The V5 5500 offers truly excellent alternative for anybody who needs to upgrade his or her video card, but doesn't have an AGP slot on their Mainboard. The only real problem 3dfx may face with offering a PCI card of this magnitude is the price. At $299 (a little lower street) this card may not appeal to the bargain hunter dominated PCI crowd.

by Ryan Wissman

Price - 5.0 Performance - 8.5 Overall - 7.5/10

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