VIA Apollo Pro 133A & VCSDRAM - Part 2: The Performance

NVIDIA claims that their GeForce 256 works at peak efficiency in AGP 4X systems, so in order to use this to our advantage in a test situation we fired up Quake 3 Arena and tweaked a few settings. The first thing was to bump up the texture detail slider in the options screen so the most detailed and thus largest textures were used. The second tweak was to implement the special higher polygon settings offered in Quake 3 that come without a performance penalty to the GeForce 256 courtesy of its hardware transforming & lighting engine. Those settings can be found below:

r_lodbias -2
r_SubDivisions 1
r_lodCurveError 10000
r_PicMip 0

It turns out that 640 x 480 was the best setting for illustrating potential performance differences between the platforms, and as you can see above the performance differences were minimal. The BX is obviously slower than the rest because of it's AGP 2X and 100MHz FSB limitations, and the 820 is on top as a result of its superior AGP implementation to the Apollo Pro 133A.

3D Studio MAX is a very memory bandwidth hungry application which is why the 820 leads by such a large margin. The Apollo Pro 133A has a difficult time keeping up with the competition, even with its 133MHz FSB frequency. The use of VC-SDRAM bumps up the performance significantly, but it still barely outperforms the BX which is running at its 100MHz FSB.