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To start the contest, 2 heavyweight Direct3D benchmarks that rely on DX8 shader hardware and also, crucially for this review, good CPU and system performance for good scores. While not CPU bechmarks outright, running only CPU tests would be missing the point, despite it being a CPU review!
Let's take a look at 3DMark 2001 SE first. A stalwart of the online review industry, 3DMark 2001 is a good test of overall system performance, stressing everything needed to make the benchmark run well. CPU, memory subsystem and graphics card are all test. So does XP2200+ and KT333 have the legs on the P4 and SiS 645DX?
That's about as close as you can get over 6 total runs over 2 different platforms. The 2nd rung P4 holds up well against the new AMD flagship CPU mainly due to having more memory bandwidth than the AMD solution. The P4 loves memory bandwidth and provided you can feed it, which we do with DDR333 memory here, performance will be strong. You could argue that the Ti4400 version of the NV25 GPU we use here is limiting the scores but testing at over 1.9GHz on the XP and 2.5GHz+ on the P4 showed the card to still be scaling quite well.
A draw in the first round, onto Aquamark. Aquamark is similar to 3DMark in the areas that it tests so we should see a similar outcome.
An 8% win for the XP2200+ over 2.4B and the Athlon is beginning to show it's strengths. While Aquamark is shader heavy and the card is doing all the shader calculations, the CPU is presumably still doing its fair share of setup work before handing off the data to the card. The XP2200+'s exceptional FPU unit helps to play a part in the win in Aquamark here and the CPU is making good use of all the available memory bandwidth ably provided with extra to spare from the DDR333 modules and the controller on the KT333 northbridge. Not quite over the magical 60fps mark when the average is taken but 60.1fps was observed on the highest run, quite an achievement.
So far we've seen the XP2200+ hold it's own against 2.4B in these two game based benchmarks, lets carry that on to a look at Quake3 and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.
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