nforce4max wrote:Very very few games from the period benefited from the FPU as they were integer dependent but hordes of people bought the DX thinking they would be getting better performance.
Well, in the early days the DX was also available at higher clockspeeds, I believe.
When I got my DX2-66, I don't think there was an SX2-66 alternative. Only 25 and 33 MHz models, if I'm not mistaken. It was the 'Celeron' of its day.
The FPU isn't very relevant for 2 reasons:
1) In the early days of 486, games had to be compatible with 386 as well, so most games would not use an FPU. I know of only one game from that era that can optionally use the FPU, and that is Falcon 3.0.
2) The FPU in the 486 wasn't very fast. For a lot of calculations, fixedpoint arithmetic on the CPU was faster than using the FPU. So even when games targeted the 486 specifically, they would generally not use the FPU. Which is also why Quake runs so badly on 486. It uses the FPU, but it is aimed at Pentium 75-90, which has a much faster FPU than a 486. So even a 486 running at 133 MHz or above won't get close to that level of performance.
Descent uses a graphics engine with similar capabilities to Quake, but aimed at 486, and not using FPU.