If by "software" you mean applications, then of course!
There's plenty of stuff with FPU support: all major spreadsheets, CAD, math...
I recall AutoCAD and Mathematica wouldn't even start without FPU.

But there's few games from that era with coprocessor support.
Scorched Earth, Sim City, some flight simulators - and that's probably all.

The first game that actually justifies an FPU is Quake...

STS Orbit Plus, Graftrak 2, AutoSketch, programs for making PCBs (Eagle?), acad, fractal programs.

In theory, everything that uses graphics primitives (set pixel, draw circle/box, fill).
Turbo Pascal programs may use FPU if they find one.

Windows 3.1 GUI drawings *could* be improved, maybe.
Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11 FPU Usage

Programs with vector graphics or built-in FPU support on Windows in general.
Have some mandelbrot stuff here that runs on Windows 2.x/3.x, also.

Moraffware Moraff's Entrap is a game that uses (and advertises) x87. Then there was a wilderness survival game that seems to use x87 for environment generation.

Falcon 3.0

games:
Falcon 3.0 - afair broken fpu flight model, plane flipping at high speed
SimCity - I cant find the video right now, but someone tested this and difference was only noticeable if you wanted time to pass faster.
Star Trek: A Final Unity - "486DX33 or better; SVGA at 640x480 256 colors" minimum, I guess you could run it on 386DX40+fpu and suffer the consequences
Runnable on 386 but non-playable (5fps? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt6xf43nnFg): Duke3D uses FPU for slopes. Can se it here on pretty fast UMC U5S 486-40 without fpu https://youtu.be/-dNaFbm_hL0?t=1115 extreme slowdown every time slope is on the screen.

Plenty of cad/cam/scientific software required fpus. Mostly targeting business/research institutions where spending $1K on additional hardware could be done without painful expense approval process.

Basically no because the games that could use a fpu could use a 386/486/pentium to play well. falcon 3.0 was released in 91, same year as the 486 50, with the first 486/integrated fpu in 89.

awgamer wrote on 2021-11-02, 04:35:

Basically no because the games that could use a fpu could use a 386/486/pentium to play well. falcon 3.0 was released in 91, same year as the 486 50, with the first 486/integrated fpu in 89.

Now what % of computers users actually owned 486/50s or 486s for that matter?

Real world users not the imaginary "everybody bought the a system with the latest cpu" users.

Sure plenty of people using xt/286/386 three years after the release of the 486, but again, by the time a fpu was helpful for games pretty much all of them were needing something better than a 286. Maybe you could belatedly throw in a fpu in with a harris 286 25 to make them playable but everything had since moved on. There's a project for you, find early games that use an fpu, benefit from it/need it, and run them on a 286 with a 287 to see how it goes.

awgamer wrote on 2021-11-02, 05:07:

Sure plenty of people using xt/286/386 three years after the release of the 486, but again, by the time a fpu was helpful for games pretty much all of them was needing something better than a 286. Maybe you could belatedly throw in a fpu in with a harris 286 25 to make them playable but everything had since moved on. There's a project for you, find early games that use an fpu, benefit from it/need it, and run them on a 286 with a 287 to see how it goes.

How cute. Telling other vogons users what they should be doing.

You do know what the relative cost of a 486 was back then? Folk were buying 386SX believing the marketing hype at the time.

I used to play Falcon 3.0 quite a lot on a 286-16 & FPU. Don't remember any problems with high speed plane flipping...

awgamer wrote on 2021-11-02, 04:35:

Basically no because the games that could use a fpu could use a 386/486/pentium to play well. falcon 3.0 was released in 91, same year as the 486 50, with the first 486/integrated fpu in 89.

In 1991 I was still gaming on an A500 and the only expansion I had was 512K extra RAM. A 486 for gaming was almost unheard of at the time, at least where I live. 386SX was still not very popular either. My rich friends had 386DX PCs, and most people with PCs I knew hat AT/286 stuff.

I remember an immediate effect in Corel Draw in Win3.1 after adding a 387 coprocessor. Not sure which version that was, unfortunately.

Imho the real reason to have a compatible 387 fpu is that if there's an empty socket to install it, why not if that doesn't bring problems in installation or mainboard config. I bought it for my 386DX 40Mhz machine just to see it running in benchmarks, Quake and with some encoding tests it'd be even possible to play Mp3 music if encoded on a very low mono 8bit 16Khz 40/50Kbps bitrate and sure that's a stressing test probably even more than Quake one imho.
Then there's the whole Win 3.1 387 usage discussion and I'm quite conviced the same thing is seen into a Win 95 installation when added to some late generation vga with the most advanced GUI acceleration features.
Also I was wondering, what about zip/rar extractor and/or image viewer software? Did they already or actually use the FPU for decompress archive files or early JPEG format encoding?

povray speedup on my 286 with weitek was mind blowing.

BloodyCactus wrote on 2021-11-02, 16:23:

povray speedup on my 286 with weitek was mind blowing.

Do you have more info of Weitek for 286 - it should be WTL 1067? Did it require special socket?

I bought one recently to put in my old 386. It cost less than $10 so why not?

386SX wrote on 2021-11-02, 15:20:

Imho the real reason to have a compatible 387 fpu is that if there's an empty socket to install it, why not if that doesn't bring problems in installation or mainboard config. I bought it for my 386DX 40Mhz machine just to see it running in benchmarks, Quake and with some encoding tests it'd be even possible to play Mp3 music if encoded on a very low mono 8bit 16Khz 40/50Kbps bitrate and sure that's a stressing test probably even more than Quake one imho.
Then there's the whole Win 3.1 387 usage discussion and I'm quite conviced the same thing is seen into a Win 95 installation when added to some late generation vga with the most advanced GUI acceleration features.
Also I was wondering, what about zip/rar extractor and/or image viewer software? Did they already or actually use the FPU for decompress archive files or early JPEG format encoding?

That's a pretty accurate representation of reality.
Software that can use a 287/387? Sure.
Software that justify one today? No, unless you're using some CAD software or trying to open a really complex spreadsheet from that era, you are a hardcore old flight sim gamer or into fractals.

Today it comes for the price of a couple of drinks, so if you have been always wondering what's like to have one detected, why not fill that socket...

kixs wrote on 2021-11-02, 08:03:

I used to play Falcon 3.0 quite a lot on a 286-16 & FPU. Don't remember any problems with high speed plane flipping...

How did it play? I might give it a go on my 0WS 286-20 w/287XL

kixs wrote on 2021-11-02, 18:01:

BloodyCactus wrote on 2021-11-02, 16:23:

povray speedup on my 286 with weitek was mind blowing.

Do you have more info of Weitek for 286 - it should be WTL 1067? Did it require special socket?

it was an IIT one my dad brought home. I dont know why I thought it was weitek.