dionb wrote on 2024-01-05, 14:04:
A P3-800 is an excellent CPU for a late 1999/early 2000 system (it was released in December 1999), but this was during the fastest period of development in PC history and by late 2001 (when WinXP came along and Win98 started to fade) it would have been very long in the tooth and incapable of playing new games. By then, P4-2000, P3-1266S or AthlonXP 1800+ were high-end and even a low-end Duron 1000, which would struggle at new games, would significantly outperform a P3-800.
Of course, most people in October 2001 didn't have a brand new PC, in fact given replacement times of about 3 years if you were lucky, most would have had something significantly older than a P3-800. So a P3-800 is perfectly representative of what a lot of people would have had. But they would not be enjoying it, they would not be able to run the latest games, and even those that would run, would generally do so very slowly. Max Payne would be an obvious example - minimum spec says a Duron 700 with D3D compatible video card with 16MB - so this P3-800 with Rage128 is about that minimum. Prepare for a slideshow - and not just during bullet time.
This is perhaps the most important thing for someone who is too young to have been around at that time. Starting in 2006 or so with the C2D launch and the poor reception of Vista, PCs stopped improving at the insane rate that they had for the previous decade or so.
Let me put it this way: in 1996, if you got the absolute fastest CPU money could buy (other than Pentium Pros which no one got for anything other than workstation), you were getting a Pentium 200. One core, 200MHz. And you might get... 32?... megs of RAM if you were lucky. Maybe 16, my memory is not so great. And you'd have, oh, maybe a 3.2 gig hard drive? Ten years later, you'd have gotten an E6600 with 2x2.40GHz cores, 2 gigs of RAM, and maybe a 320-500 gig hard drive. And that's not even talking about video cards - 3D accelerators didn't exist in 1996, in 2006 you would have gotten an Nvidia 7800 or similar. Most people, wallet permitting, would have gone through four machines in roughly this time period - a late 486/middle Pentium on Win95, a late Pentium II type machine that would likely have been their last 98 machine and maybe their first Win2000 machine, a 2002ish P4/Athlon XP running XP, and then a 2005-7ish Athlon X2 or C2D.
And, frankly, software was designed on the assumption that the hardware was improving that quickly. All software would have 'minimum' requirements, at which the software was effectively unusable, and 'recommended' requirements, at which the software was passably usable, but really, the expectation was that within 2-3 years, everybody would have something dramatically more capable than the recommended requirements. "Recommended" requirement on a software box from 1997 really means "double everything it says if you want an actually good experience, at least by the standards of the late 2000s"
To pick an example of this insanity, my January-1995 486 machine with 4 megs of RAM, admittedly on the lower end of things, could not run Office 4.2 (released the year before) under Windows 3.1 passably without a RAM upgrade to 8 gigs (CAD$250) three months later. Sure, this was a somewhat lower end machine, but a brand new, lower end machine, could not run productivity software released six months before without a RAM upgrade. And we're talking an office suite here, not CAD or 3D rendering software! I never tried running Office 95 on that machine (couldn't afford it); by the time Office 97 rolled around less than two years later, you wouldn't even bother trying, you knew that machine couldn't handle it in any way. So... the late 1996 version of Office was hopeless on a machine that cost CAD$2000 (which is probably like $3500 in 2024 money) in January 1995.
All I will say to the OP - you are lucky, in a way, that you were not the age you are now in this era. It was this awkward thing, basically asking parents to spend thousands of dollars on new computers starting about 2.5 years (or maybe 6 months later if they sprung for something really high-end) after they paid for the last one, and if you were persuasive enough, maybe after a year of begging you'd get another machine. At my current age, I start to understand how insane that must have seemed to them.
