kixs wrote on 2024-09-04, 07:11:
BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-03, 13:59:
There has been some new ULSI 3c87 FPU going for reasonable money on fleabay. If you benchmark those on science and actual mathematics oriented benchmarks, they only perform in the top half, but if you benchmark them in games, they do well, even being best in some instances (It's that whole optimizing common instructions at the expense of less commonly used instructions thing). However, most of the '92 up games that can use an FPU still play very very slowly on a 386, so it's only for bragging rights, realistically, even DX2/66 are too slow to have a smooth experience on those games.
Do you know what games are those?
I only know of Falcon 3.0 that uses FPU. But it should work fine on a 386-33 with 387 not to mention 486DX2-66.
Falcon 3.0 was 1991, but I might as well have said from 95 up, since that's when the ball really started rolling, Duke Nukem 3D doesn't strictly need an FPU to launch, but has crippling slowdowns when any slopes come into view if you don't have one. Then Quake and quake engine games require it, and then many more games start to need it, though they probably just specify Pentium minimum by then and don't call it out.
Although ppl who have used FPU on Falcon 3.0 report that it doesn't "work fine" so much, it only comes into play in high accuracy flight mode which is reported to have a number of glitches.
Sim City often gets mentioned, but the only advantage that has been documented is that time acceleration can work faster.
Moraffware's Entrap can use x87 to speed up playfield generation, likewise Links 386 is reported to speed up environment generation with an x87, but no change in actual gameplay.
When it was only required to shuffle pixels accurately enough to look good on 320x240 or even 640x480 integer math was very much faster, floating point math was horrendously slow, and FPUs made it better than horrendously slow, but still didn't bring it up to the speed of integer math, so FPU was mostly irrelevant to gaming performance for many years.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
