After posting the screenshots of Quake 3 Arena running on the Neon 250 video card yesterday, we received a lot of email from our readers asking us to post screenshots with the frame-rate counter turned on so that the actual performance of the board can be extrapolated. After all, what good is image quality if the performance is at the level of a slide show's?
With that in mind, we obtained four screenshots with the counter displayed in the upper right-hand corner. These shots were taken on a Pentium III 500MHz system with 128MB of memory. Full graphics options were turned on in Quake 3 Arena, which was running at 1024x768. The Neon 250 scores were in the mid- to high-thirties in almost all instances. It should be noted, however, that each fps number denotes a streaming counter obtained at the point in gameplay when the screenshot was taken, and not an average benchmark from several minutes of playtime - so be careful before drawing conclusions based on these figures.
The Neon 250 will be available this August for US$175 in both PCI and AGP variations.