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3DMark up first, a full system test that relies on CPU horsepower, CPU bandwidth, system memory bandwidth and of course graphics card performance on both the GPU and memory sides.
With the slowest CPU on test and the slowest graphics card too, expect the Twinforce 2 to bring up the rear in the graphics heavy test. The key thing is how close it gets to the other systems so you can guage the overall performance of both components.
Remembering that we aren't using the new 40.xx drivers but the 28.80's the 3DMark score of just less than 10,000 is spot on the for hardware and driver combination on Windows XP. Remembering that we are on the default driver setting (decent quality) for the driver and our previous assertions at Hexus that given most DX8 software, a score over 6000 is indicative of strong DX8 performance and you can see that the Twinforce 2 combination is potent, given a decent CPU under the hood.
Will this translate to the same situation with Quake3? Being strong on avery hardware accelerated platform that implements a pseudo-DX6 class renderer, Quake3 should fly on the Twinforce 2 combo.
In the lower resolutions where the graphics card is nowhere near to being the bottleneck to high performance and where overall system bandwidth is the key, the Twinforce 2 pair bring up the rear. But when the card is made to do all the work at higher resolutions, it becomes much more competative with the other systems. Also since 1600x1200 is a very playable resolution for the Twinforce 2 pairing, performance when compared to the other systems is quite strong.
We should see the same thing with Serious Sam 2.
Ignoring the anomalous P4 result, the Twinforce 2 pair manages to keep up with the other AMD systems on test at 1600x1200 so we again see it's strength when pushed compared to a slightly faster overall setup.
Onto Aquamark and Comanche 4.
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