Lies, damn lies, statistics, and benchmarks. I'm curious as to how much of the jerkiness and slowness in that test was due to comparing the integrated graphics on the P3 machine with dedicated graphics on the P4. Hooray for rigged demos.
The benchmark is definitely misleading because the Powerpoint workload is playing on a continuous loop. This means that when the test is over, the Pentium III ends up performing more overall work than the Pentium 4.
Any time you have operating systems running in a test of this kind, you're dealing with the same thing, a difference in work done the longer the test runs.
I do not think there was graphical acceleration for videos back then. It is probably doing well from the SSE2 instructions that Intel's marketing made certain the video player was using for decode. If it were not for that, the Pentium 4 would not have done as well.
There was. Way back in the day, I even had an mpeg-2 accelerator card that passed through a signal to do its magic. The card used in the P4 was a Geforce 2 GTS, which did have mpeg acceleration. The onboard graphics of the P3 accelerated certain primitives, like motion compensation, but not to the degree of the P4.
