My system:
Abit BX6 2.0 motherboard
Celeron 433 SEPP
96 Megs RAM (3 identical Samsung PC66 DIMMs)
Creative Labs SoundBlaster AWE64
STB Velocity 4400 AGP TNT card, running Detonator 2.08 drivers
8.4 gig and 2.5 gig Western Digital UDMA/33 EIDE hard drives

Dakota's system:
SuperMicro motherboard w/integrated SCSI
Pentium II 400
128 Megs PC100 RAM
Diamond MonsterSound MX200
Intel i740 card and
Canopus Pure3D II 12 megabyte Voodoo2 card, running the latest 3dfx reference drivers
9 gig and 2 gig SCSI hard drives

Sorry I don't have quite as detailed information on Dakota's system, but he's not around at the moment to bug him about it. In general, his system should outperform mine a bit due to his SCSI drives and controller and more RAM. For gaming, our systems seem subjectively fairly similar in performance. Now, as a given, my Celeron 433 IS a bit faster than his PII 400, and there's the entire issue of the 128k full-speed cache of the Celeron vs. the 512k half-speed cache of the PII that should be taken into consideration.

If you question any of the conclusions or results I've gotten, then by all means, try things for yourself. Everyone's system configuration and preferences are different; this guide is only meant to help you understand how much various options and settings affect performance.

To run your own timedemos to benchmark your system:

Bring down the Q3Test console from the main menu (use the ~ key).
Type "timedemo 1" and hit enter.
Then type "demo q3testdemo1" or "demo q3testdemo2" and hit enter.
When the demo has finished running, it will return you to the main menu. Hit the ~ to bring down the console and see your average frame rate result.

For those of you with TNT2s or Voodoo3s, results should be similar, but at much higher frame rates of course. TNT2/V3 cards should be able to run with higher resolutions much more easily. I would expect numbers similar to or better than the 640x480 numbers in this article at 800x600 on these newer cards… you lucky bastards.