Are there DOS games requiring Pentium? Sure lots.
Tomb Raider and Quake come to mind. While they "run" on a 486, they are quite slow without Pentium.
I am quite sure there are also games that require 16MB of RAM as well.

No idea about high color/true color in DOS games.

Extreme Assault is one of those and can even use MMX for bilinear filtering some sprites.

Armored Fist 2 can really choke also, probably even more so than Comanche 3.

Tunnel B1 (not a very well known game) that has 16-bit colours video mode requires quite a fast Pentium based CPU to run smoothly.
Problem is that this game doesn't support 3D hardware (all rendering is done in software).

Basically, any SVGA (640x480 or higher) based DOS game requires a Pentium CPU to run smoothly (Duke Nukem 3D and Privateer 2 also comes to mind).

I always found Blood was very prone to slowdown, even on some fast Pentium II machines... In fact, it still occasionally hiccuped on an Athlon 1500+ as well as if you put the CD in, you have to wait for the track to loop every time it ends. Woefully inefficient in my opinion.

Comanche 3 is heavy, but at least it has good reasons for it. Blood's revision of the Build engine was optimized for Pentium processors as far as I remember, though actually running it well on a Pentium is a bit of a big ask and rarely produces good results unless you crank all the settings down, especially later versions such as 1.21 where it ran even worse and was almost unplayable on the 75MHz Pentium baseline they had set.

Grand Prix 2

I believe Fallout demanded 32MB in DOS.

smeezekitty wrote:

Are there DOS games requiring Pentium? Sure lots. Tomb Raider and Quake come to mind. While they "run" on a 486, they are quite […]
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Are there DOS games requiring Pentium? Sure lots.
Tomb Raider and Quake come to mind. While they "run" on a 486, they are quite slow without Pentium.
I am quite sure there are also games that require 16MB of RAM as well.

No idea about high color/true color in DOS games.

quake also came to my mind but it would run with 8mb ram minimal, and i did run it on a 486, so it doesn't count as "pentium required".
even quake2 was rumored to run on 386+387 rigs with 16 or 24mb ram, although i have never seen for myself. i only ran it on the same 486.

MDK really demanded a Pentium. It'll refuse to run if you fail the speed check at the start.

I always considered Carmageddon to be quite demanding.
Also Screamer 2 in software mode ... never ran at a "full" framerate with up to 700MHz.

leileilol wrote:

MDK really demanded a Pentium. It'll refuse to run if you fail the speed check at the start.

Won't it run on a fast 486 with -486willbeslow ? If so, how much slower than say a Pentium 60 or 75 would it be?

carlostex wrote:

Grand Prix 2

I remember playing that on my 486 DX2-66. In my memory it ran ok, but 15FPS was acceptable back then, so I don't trust my memory that much in this regard 😀

Pyl?

Quake , Tomb Raider, any build engine game, will all benefit alot from a Pentium with 16-32MB of RAM. Warcraft II will run on a 486 but really would benefit from something better too.

I also remember Wing Commander III recommending a Pentium 60 for SVGA mode, and even on a Pentium 133 it still has some minor slowdown at times (particularly when very close to a large ship)

devius wrote:

carlostex wrote:

Grand Prix 2

I remember playing that on my 486 DX2-66. In my memory it ran ok, but 15FPS was acceptable back then, so I don't trust my memory that much in this regard 😀

I think the point is running games with everything maxed out. Try SVGA with all details and frame rate at 25.6 and even a Pentium 233MMX will crawl at times. Specially at Monaco.

MDK really demanded a Pentium. It'll refuse to run if you fail the speed check at the start.

I hate software that tries to be smart and takes the option away from the user.

From what I've read, The Elder Scrolls: Battlespire is supposed to be very demanding.

On topic of BUILD games, they don't really demand a Pentium. The engine is entirely integer, one could say they demand a Cyrix or K5 😀