Sub-$200 Video Card Roundup - April 2002

Quake III Arena

This game requires no introduction, the test has been with us for a while and we continue to use it as the engine continues to have a lot of life left in it. We tested with the game's High Quality defaults.

Quake III Arena 800x600x32

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 64MB ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB 249.7 248.0 245.4 243.9 236.1 235.4 208.7 196.8 103.2 | 0 | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 | 300

At 800x600 we are primarily CPU bound in this test and thus the majority of the cards perform very close to one another.

Quake III Arena 1024x768x32

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB 227.6 215.6 207.5 206.0 194.1 188.8 155.0 138.0 68.3 | 0 | 46 | 91 | 137 | 182 | 228 | 273

The situation changes slightly at 1024x768; you'll notice that this is one of the few cases where there's a small performance difference between the 64MB Radeon 8500 and the 128MB Radeon 8500LE. Quake III Arena doesn't really have a use for the added texture memory so it favors the additional memory bandwidth of the Radeon 8500 over the 8500LE.

This is one benchmark in which the GeForce4 MX does extremely well in, mostly because it is an older game and is mainly dependent on memory bandwidth which the GeForce4 MX has a good amount of at the GPU's disposal.

Quake III Arena 1280x1024x32

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB 172.2 155.9 147.7 147.7 135.2 128.9 102.8 90.2 42.9 | 0 | 34 | 69 | 103 | 138 | 172 | 207