Yes, of course I understand.

I'd think more beneficial would be "what games REFUSE to run or CRASH if MMX is not present" which is why I suggested that.

But you seem to be interested in "what games might see a performance boost if MMX is present" which is entirely different.

I'm interested in both. My opinion is just that the list you've given is about neither 😀

Well, certainly you can check every single game on the list and note those that really won't run without MMX. I just have my doubts that anyone is going to do that 🤣

d1stortion wrote:

To give you something of an analogy, NFS MW (2005) has a minimum requirement of a 1.4 GHz CPU, but it can actually start on a P233 MMX, believe it or not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9X6JcUn0TY

That game is one of the few "blockbusters" from 2005 that my PIII-S at 1.59GHz can completely max out @ 1280x960 and still average ~30fps. It actually seems to hit the video card quite hard; it was pretty much the only game that ran noticeably better when I temporarily upgraded that box from a 9800 Pro to an X1950 Pro.

The game has heavy D3D9 shader usage. It's said to require that actually but will run on D3D7 cards, without the effects obviously.

I have an X1950 Pro in my main PC and it struggles with the game at 1920x1080. In the video there is a Geforce FX card running the game, but on a CPU 8 years older than the game we can safely rule out the video card as the bottleneck I think. 😉 Even the timer is running far from realtime.

both 3dmark2000 and 2001 demands a processor supporting mmx, and both pops an error message if you attempt to run it on a cpu without. however after the message, 3dmark01 still lets you enter the tests, while 2000 simply quits.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

To give you something of an analogy, NFS MW (2005) has a minimum requirement of a 1.4 GHz CPU, but it can actually start on a P233 MMX, believe it or not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9X6JcUn0TY

That game is one of the few "blockbusters" from 2005 that my PIII-S at 1.59GHz can completely max out @ 1280x960 and still average ~30fps. It actually seems to hit the video card quite hard; it was pretty much the only game that ran noticeably better when I temporarily upgraded that box from a 9800 Pro to an X1950 Pro.

i was also playing nfsmw on my p3s-1.4g, but with a geforce6600 card. i used minimum quality because i am always extremely sensitive to fps, and i was upset at fps dropping below 40 when the screen is full of cops. 😠
i wonder if i can get it to run on a idt c6 though, but the game needs 512mb ram to run, which is too much for the socket7 cpus to handle.

Serious Sam requires MMX to run at all.

noshutdown wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

To give you something of an analogy, NFS MW (2005) has a minimum requirement of a 1.4 GHz CPU, but it can actually start on a P233 MMX, believe it or not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9X6JcUn0TY

That game is one of the few "blockbusters" from 2005 that my PIII-S at 1.59GHz can completely max out @ 1280x960 and still average ~30fps. It actually seems to hit the video card quite hard; it was pretty much the only game that ran noticeably better when I temporarily upgraded that box from a 9800 Pro to an X1950 Pro.

i was also playing nfsmw on my p3s-1.4g, but with a geforce6600 card. i used minimum quality because i am always extremely sensitive to fps, and i was upset at fps dropping below 40 when the screen is full of cops. 😠
i wonder if i can get it to run on a idt c6 though, but the game needs 512mb ram to run, which is too much for the socket7 cpus to handle.

it is my favourite too, but presently on 'suspended' status since i tried to play it on my signature P3 rig. i normally try the 'black edition challenge' in the challenge series to get the hang of 'how worse the gameplay will get to', due to numerous cops on the scene at the start itself. mine starts with 45 fps and dips to 11 in an intersection, though the graphics settings and the resolution(upto 1280x1024) doesn't affect it much. but it's a beautiful game, what can i say.

edit: left out the question.does the absence of sse(pentiumpro) or sse2(p3) really affect the gameplay or the game developers have different paths in their game engine?

noshutdown wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

To give you something of an analogy, NFS MW (2005) has a minimum requirement of a 1.4 GHz CPU, but it can actually start on a P233 MMX, believe it or not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9X6JcUn0TY

That game is one of the few "blockbusters" from 2005 that my PIII-S at 1.59GHz can completely max out @ 1280x960 and still average ~30fps. It actually seems to hit the video card quite hard; it was pretty much the only game that ran noticeably better when I temporarily upgraded that box from a 9800 Pro to an X1950 Pro.

i was also playing nfsmw on my p3s-1.4g, but with a geforce6600 card. i used minimum quality because i am always extremely sensitive to fps, and i was upset at fps dropping below 40 when the screen is full of cops. 😠
i wonder if i can get it to run on a idt c6 though, but the game needs 512mb ram to run, which is too much for the socket7 cpus to handle.

Cops didn't seem to bother my system too much (perhaps because of the CPU overclock...or maybe I just didn't notice). However, some of the weather effects brought my 9800 Pro down to around 15fps. The AGP x1950Pro solved that problem though...it ran the game at a nice smooth 25-45fps with all settings maxed out. That was just a temporary upgrade, though. Most of the games I play on the PIII are older DX7-8 titles which actually run a little faster on the 9800 Pro. The X1950 appears to add some extra CPU overhead. For example, a completely CPU-limited game that averages 140fps on the 9800Pro only runs at 115fps on the x1950, even with the same driver.

gandhig wrote:

edit: left out the question.does the absence of sse(pentiumpro) or sse2(p3) really affect the gameplay or the game developers have different paths in their game engine?

Individual testing for each game would be needed to make a statement on how they benefit from extra instructions. But let's say you have two ancient (by the standard of the game) CPUs of same architecture, one with extra instructions and one without, and the one with extra instructions would give noticeably better framerates at same clockspeed while still being unplayable. You could make a case for those instructions having an impact on performance here, but it's really just of theoretical interest since any CPU that is fit for running the game would have that instruction set anyway.

Thinking about it I believe 3DMark99 and friends are heavily SSE optimized, and given how those benchmarks have individual CPU tests it would probably have a significant impact on scores? Always an old trick for promoting a new processor generation 😀

I think MICROSOFT FURY was an mmx optimized game from what I recall. And I think I also recall that it kinda sucked.

Wrong. Fury predates MMX by two whole years, and Hellbender by one. Also it's heavily an integer game with hardly any use for such a technology...

Well MMX is integer only itself, isn't it...

leileilol wrote:

Wrong. Fury predates MMX by two whole years, and Hellbender by one. Also it's heavily an integer game with hardly any use for such a technology...

Thanks for claifying...nice to know...I didn't want to play that game on my P166MMX again anyway 🤣

The PowerPC family of processors also have AltiVec and its derivatives. Pretty sure that at least some console games made use of those instructions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltiVec

Frogger has a mode where you can use MMX in combination with sofware rendering. I don't think it's used when you use 3d acceleration from a video card though.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Cops didn't seem to bother my system too much (perhaps because of the CPU overclock...or maybe I just didn't notice). However, some of the weather effects brought my 9800 Pro down to around 15fps. The AGP x1950Pro solved that problem though...it ran the game at a nice smooth 25-45fps with all settings maxed out. That was just a temporary upgrade, though. Most of the games I play on the PIII are older DX7-8 titles which actually run a little faster on the 9800 Pro. The X1950 appears to add some extra CPU overhead. For example, a completely CPU-limited game that averages 140fps on the 9800Pro only runs at 115fps on the x1950, even with the same driver.

Have you considered trying an x800 or x850 based card in that system? There was a considerable jump in performance when ATi released the x800 to replace the 9800 so somewhere in that lineup might be the perfect card for playing later games at acceptable framerates without slowing down older games.

Sliderider - I think he needs your 6800 Ultra Extreme. 😉

Z.A.R. (1997) MMX version (DOS/Windows).