What are those "Demo"s for Benchmarks?

[eden]

In many Video card benchmarks I notice they use Tests of Demoes, such the Quake 3, or NV15. What are these and what is their test composing?

 

[Sihs]

When you are playing the game, Quake 3 Arena, you can record what you are doing. The game comes with prerecorded demos so what everyone does is play that demo (prerecorded game) on his pc using the settings he chooses and the game runs this movie-like game as fast as the pc can handle. In the end it calculates how many frames the pc was able to get. So this is why a Radeon gets 86 frames per second on 1024*768 resolution, 32bit color max detail while Geforce 3 can get 150+ (I think). The geforce 3 can process more frames in that demo so it gets a higher score.
NV15 is the demo recorded by Nvidia beta testers and staff (whoever) on a specific map (nv bunker as I recall) and it is very cpu intensive. Even the geforce 3 ti500 cannot get more than 55 frames and it basically depends on the processor you are running.
To benchmark your pc, type ` to drop down the console, enter "timedemo 1" and then "demo demo001", "demo demo127" or "demo four" depending on what version of quake you are running.

Hope this helps.

note to self: don't be this bored again or you'll end up writing lengthy explanations and bore the crap out of people.