3D Performance: Quake III

We used the demo four available on version 1.32 of Quake III to make our benchmarking with this game. We ran this demo three times at 1024x768x32 resolution and all image quality settings on their default configuration and we picked the middle value for our comparisons, i.e. we discarded the highest and the lowest values.

We didn’t use Quake 4 because with its latest patch installed (1.4.2 when this review was published) it complained that it couldn’t be run with the hardware we had – i.e. it couldn’t be run on AMD 690G.

You can check the results of our benchmarking below. All the listed video cards were installed on Foxconn A690GM2MA.

Here Foxconn A690GM2MA achieved the worst performance among the motherboards with on-board video we included in our comparison: ECS AMD690GM-M2 (AMD 690G) was 8.26% faster, MSI K9AGM2 (AMD 690G) was 13.93% faster, ECS RS485M-M (ATI Radeon Xpress 1100) was 15.04% faster, ECS GeForce6100SM-M was 19.73% faster and Abit AN-M2 (GeForce 7025) was amazingly 44.88% faster.

The problem is that even the “worst” PCI Express video card is a lot faster than on-board video solutions: GeForce 6200 with 64-bit memory interface and TurboCache technology was 150% faster than Foxconn A690GM2MA. This is a brutal difference. GeForce 6200 with 128-bit memory interface was 253% faster.

ASUS M2N32-SLI De Luxe was 5.32% faster than the reviewed motherboard when we installed our overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS.

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