KalNet Message Board

The Athlon Optimized Programs Page features downloads of DLLs said to improve the performance of Quake III Arena, among other apps, on AMD hardware. They have posted new Athlon XP DLLs, saying: "Note to people who think these DLLs are "unfair" in benchmarks. This is horribly incorrect. Quake3 (even with an Athlon XP) forces AMD chips to use 3DNow, not SSE. Little do people know the 3DNow! code is completely broken in Quake3. It does not help at ALL. The Pentium 3 and 4 chips however are both detected as "Pentium 3" chips, which automatically uses SSE which DOES work in Quake3 and gives a significant FPS boost. These DLLs don't enable SSE but do help with Athlons.. and if SSE was to ever be enabled in Quake3 for Athlon processors they would blow Pentium 4 chips out of the water even more. In the tests I ran a P4-2.53 @ 3.32GHz, 175/700fsb lost to a "stock" Athlon XP 2700+(2166MHz, 166fsb) using these dlls..."

Thanks rms.