EPoX 4SDA5+ SiS 648 Motherboard Review

Real-World OpenGL Benchmarks

Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena is a real-world OpenGL benchmark that we have been using here at TweakTown for quite a while now because it has proven itself to be one of the best gaming benchmarks around to compare a wide range of different products. Quake III is getting very old, but is still the best way of testing video and PC systems for any instabilities and best performance.

Quake III may be old, but it is the best game for checking out stability and stressing the components.

Star Trek Voyager

Star Trek Voyager is another real-world OpenGL benchmark. Based on the Quake III Arena engine, this game is an OpenGL master utilizing DirectX 8. We also apply the new Opt3D patch to allow for the use of Hardware T&L as well as new optimizations for AMD Athlon XP and Pentium 4 SSE2.

Star Trek Voyager, being so closely based on Quake III, gives us a similar display curve.

Jedi Knight II

Jedi Knight II, Jedi Outcast is a newly released OpenGL game that many have been waiting for. It has greatly improved graphics over its predecessor and it fully supports advanced shaders, as well as very high texture resolutions and effects. There is one demo included in the multi-player section that is good for benchmarking use. In order to enable the benchmarking mode, you have to make a shortcut to the jk2mp.exe program located in the GameData folder of Jedi Knight 2. You have to put the switch "+set sv_cheats1" (no quotes) at the end of the line in the Target Area so that it looks like this: C:\Star Wars JK II Jedi Outcast\GameData\jk2mp.exe" +set sv_cheats 1. The demo file used is jk2ffa.

Jedi Knight is highly based on DX 8.1 code and shows a great performance boost over i845G.