system monitor in 98 is broken in regards to CPU usage numbers. see here: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?ti … _Archive/227131

while not confirmed in the KB article, it's rumored to be related to the poor ACPI implementation in 98.

What program do you use for monitoring CPU usage?

I used to use WinTop from KernelToys package from Microsoft.
https://binary-fusi0n.tripod.com/system/w95krnltoys_w32.html

In case of games they will probably use all the CPU power you have. Regardless of having a 3dfx or not in your case.

auron wrote on 2024-08-28, 03:00:

system monitor in 98 is broken in regards to CPU usage numbers. see here: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?ti … _Archive/227131

while not confirmed in the KB article, it's rumored to be related to the poor ACPI implementation in 98.

Well, that would explain away my answer. I was going to say, from my memories at the time, nearly every game had 100% CPU usage. I thought that's just how games ran on single core CPUs from the 8088 through the Athlon 64. It was part of why we got so mad at Valve for forcing Steam on us when Half-Life 2 came out. We needed those precious CPU cycles it was eating up in the background!

well, starcraft 1 had a late patch that added a "cpu throttling" option. presumably, before that, it would run at high CPU usage as well. but cases like that may be due to busy waiting as opposed to the CPU doing actual work.

auron wrote on 2024-08-28, 15:16:

well, starcraft 1 had a late patch that added a "cpu throttling" option. presumably, before that, it would run at high CPU usage as well. but cases like that may be due to busy waiting as opposed to the CPU doing actual work.

Diablo 1 worked exactly the same; the main thread called PeekMessage() in an infinite loop. The cpu throttling option added a call to Sleep(1) when there are no pending messages.

Alright, then it makes sense. Thank you people!