AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1 GHz / 800 MHz

By benchmarking on a Voodoo5 we isolate the CPU a bit more by removing the T&L that the GeForce 2 GTS provides. The Pentium III clearly comes out ahead on a clock for clock basis, even "crippled" by the VIA 133A platform. Since this was not the case with the GeForce 2 GTS, there are a couple possible explanations. Either the Voodoo5 drivers SSE optimizations are better than their 3DNow! optimizations, the Pentium III SSE is actually faster than the Athlon 3DNow!, or the Pentium III is actually better at performing the T&L calculations that the GeForce 2 GTS was performing previously. While the drivers used here were final shipping versions, there is always room for improvement in the future.

The Thunderbird's low latency cache does give an 8% performance improvement compared to the original Athlon at similar clock speeds. This compares with the 4% improvement we saw with the GeForce 2 GTS.

At 1024x768x32, we see the fillrate of the Voodoo5 5500 become the bottleneck, just as we did before. Basically, everything performs the same with the exception of the slowest CPU's.