Benchmark Explanations

To set up the cards for benchmarking there are a few things we need to do:

Install the latest drivers for the card.
Install the latest version of DirectX.  Current version is DirectX 7.0.
Set the refresh rate to the highest setting your monitor will handle at each resolution.
In Advanced Options select "Do not sync buffer swaps to monitor refresh rate in D3D.
In Advanced Options select "Do not sync buffer swaps to monitor refresh rate in Glide.
The computer was re-booted just prior to each benchmark at each resolution.
Absolutely nothing else was running on the computer other than the games used to benchmark.

Hit ctrl alt del and end task anything that is running except Explorer and Systray

Quake II Benchmarking for dummies
To perform the Quake 2 Benchmark we used Quake 2 v3.20 loaded with the medium install options.  There was no CD in the drive. Screen and texture set to maximum.  8 bit textures set to "yes" and sync every frame set to "no".  The desired resolution was selected and then the the following commands were typed into the console:

s_initsound 0 - to turn off all sound
snd_restart - to re-initialize sound with the previous statement active
timedemo 1 - to put Quake2 into the timedemo benchmarking mode
map demo1.dm2 - to run the demo

Each demo was run five times in succession. The highest and lowest scores were dropped, and the remaining three averaged to give the final score.

Quake 3 Test Benchmark
To perform the Quake 3 Test Bench you will need Q3Test 1.08.

In System | Graphics Options set the following

Color Depth - DEFAULT
fullscreen - ON
lighting - LIGHTMAP
geometric detail - HIGH
texture detail - Max(all the way to the right)
texture quality - DEFAULT
texture filter - BILINEAR

In System set the following

high quality sound - LOW

bring down the console with the ` key and type:

set cg_drawfps 1

This will make it displays the current frames per second in the upper right hand corner.  Then type:

timedemo 1
demo q3demo1

This will run the demo and give you an average fps when you open the console upon the demos completion.

My scores are derived from running the demo 5 times in succession and then dropping the lowest and highest scores, adding the remaining scores and dividing by 3.

As I was going through the console commands and working on my scripts I realized that the s_initsound var from Quake 2 is also present in Q3A.  Turning off the sound removes the influence of your soundcard from the benchmark and gives you a better idea of how the video card alone stacks up.  So for the following benchmarks I have used the following to turn of the sound before the timedemo var:

s_initsound 0
snd_restart

The only real difference in the test for the Retail version of Quake 3 is that you start the demo with the command line:

demo demo001

Forsaken Benchmark
The forsaken benchmark tests Direct 3D performance in both 800x600 and 640x480 on the voodoo2 cards.  we set up the visual options to the desired resolution and leave the rest at the default settings.

The Sound Options are set to:

Sound FX: 0%
CD Audio: OFF
Bike Engines: OFF

Speech Options are set to:

Biker Speech: OFF
Biker Computer: OFF

Then the NUKE demo was played at 100% Playback Speed.  When the demo finishes just load the demo again and it will give you the Average Frames Per Second of the previous playback.  We followed OGR's method of averaging the results of 3 times through the demo per resolution as 5 took too long.

Turok the Benchmark Hunter
Turok the Dinosaur Hunter tests the performance of Glide at 640x480 on all voodoo based cards.  The demo was run using the following command line:

turok.exe -benchmark -alldrivers -nosound

The 3Dfx custom driver was selected from the video menu and "Ignore vlbanks" was checked.  The demo was also run without the CD in the drive to keep it from playing CD Audio.  The demo was allowed to run 3 full times through in which at the end of each time the number in the middle is the Average Frames Per Second.  The results of all 3 runs were averaged to get the final score.  Note:  After the demo is run 3 times you have to ctrl alt del and then end task to the Turok 3dfx process in order to stop the demo.

3D Mark 2000