That's just my opinion, but:

-AMD K6-2 233 MHz is equivalent to which pentium? => Pentium 200
-AMD K6-2 500 MHz is equivalent to which pentium? => Pentium II 400
-AMD K6-2 PLUS 500 MHz is equivalent to which pentium? => Pentium II 450
-AMD K6-3 400 MHz is equivalent to which pentium? => Pentium II 450
-AMD K6-3 PLUS 500 MHz is equivalent to which pentium? => Pentium III 450

Very tough to compare as they have VASTLY different performance characteristics with respect to CPU and floating-point operations.
I would say that winuser_pl's opinion is very optimistic and definitely only considers non-FPU intensive applications.

Compare DOOM scores and Quake scores of each of these processors to see what I mean.

Not even close.... my k6-3+ clocked at 550-600mhz is in games about equal to a p2-300 to 350mhz. In normal apps they can be pretty equal and actually sometimes a bit faster. in games they can't hold a candle. Clock for clock in games they are about as fast as the pentium1 mmx.

The k6-3 is up to 20% faster compared to the k6-2, depending a bit on the software/game. k6-2+ around 10%.

These are performance figures based on my tests:

Average of many application and game tests
K6-2 233 = P233 MMX
K6-2 450 = PII 266
K6-III 450 = Celeron 366
K6-III+ 577 = PII 450

meljor wrote:

Not even close.... my k6-3+ clocked at 550-600mhz is in games about equal to a p2-300 to 350mhz. In normal apps they can be pretty equal and actually sometimes a bit faster. in games they can't hold a candle. Clock for clock in games they are about as fast as the pentium1 mmx.

The k6-3 is up to 20% faster compared to the k6-2, depending a bit on the software/game. k6-2+ around 10%.

But again, it depends op *which* games.

Your figures here sound like the Quake 1 engine, which is FPU-intensive - and it's well-known that the K6 can't hold a candle to the P6:

However a lot of period games were more ALU-intensive, and there the difference is much smaller, with the full-speed caches of the K6Plus CPUs compentating to the point where they can equal clock-for-clock Deschutes/Katmai scores.

See eg:

And then you had things that actually used 3DNow, like Quake 2, which would give K6 an advantage.

Bottom line: as tpowell.ca said, you simply can't compare architecturally different CPUs in this way. There is no absolute "better", only "better at ...". You need to look on a per-application, per architecture basis.

It would be interesting to see frame rate over time graphs. To get an idea of frame rate consistency of AMD vs Intel. Of course the video card would be part of the equation there just as it is today.

The Unreal numbers above - is that Glide or D3D? It looks extremely limited by CPU overhead or by GPU inadequacy.

According to Anand they tested with:
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Video Card (8MB)
Canopus Pure3D-2 Voodoo2 (12MB)

Agreed that Unreal looks rather GPU-limited here.

Those graphs are from anandtech. He used a TNT. I wonder what driver he used and what settings? From the article, his half life results are really low for a P2. He got 22.3fps on a P2 400 with the TNT. I got 34.72 fps on a P2 450 with a TNT. I even used an old version of half life, old driver (2.08 from 99) and the same demo. I wonder if he had gl_sgis_multitexture enabled, on those old drivers it is disabled by default but that doesn't explain why his K6-3 numbers look ok.

I was looking at: https://www.anandtech.com/show/211/4

dionb wrote:

According to Anand they tested with: Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Video Card (8MB) Canopus Pure3D-2 Voodoo2 (12MB) […]
Show full quote

According to Anand they tested with:
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Video Card (8MB)
Canopus Pure3D-2 Voodoo2 (12MB)

Agreed that Unreal looks rather GPU-limited here.

Do you have a link? I must be looking at a different article

Edit: I found it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/207/6

IMO K6-2 is above 233 MMX but bellow Pentium II (even the low clocked ones)
even if in some applications it's competitive, in others it's really bad and on average Intel was clearly well ahead.

It should probably also be mentioned that Quake 2 with 3DNow patch is likely by far the most aggressive 3DNow effort and that AMD wrote it (undoubtedly for reviews to display). The patch is a combination of game code changes and a special Voodoo2 MiniGL.

Note that the Quake2 mentioned isn't stock Quake2 that's 3dnow optimized. It's an explicitly released unsupported build that has 3DNow optimizations done by AMD themselves. The source of that was never released, so don't expect the same boosts in any source ports either.

There's also 3dnow optimizations from 3dfx's end in their Voodoo2 drivers as well after some point in early 99...

leileilol wrote:

Note that the Quake2 mentioned isn't stock Quake2 that's 3dnow optimized. It's an explicitly released unsupported build that has 3DNow optimizations done by AMD themselves. The source of that was never released, so don't expect the same boosts in any source ports either.

There's also 3dnow optimizations from 3dfx's end in their Voodoo2 drivers as well after some point in early 99...

Leileilol how did we post almost the same thing within 3 minutes of each other? 🤣

I'm about to start building my dos machine and I have a K6-3+ 400mhz, and I also have a 166mhz MMX Pentium cpu that came with the s7 board.

I will be using this pc for dos games and the occasional glide game on the banshee i'm putting in it.

should I stick with the Pentium for compatibility or use the K6-3+ for versatility with setmul? I have a P3 550 with voodoo 3 for "newer" glide games in win98.

the dos games are probably gonna be from 1991 onwards.

thanks.

What is the equivalent to Pentium of a AMD K6-2 333MHz?

I would say something like Pentium II 300 MHz in integer operations and Pentium II 266 MHz in a floating point use.

leileilol wrote:

Note that the Quake2 mentioned isn't stock Quake2 that's 3dnow optimized. It's an explicitly released unsupported build that has 3DNow optimizations done by AMD themselves. The source of that was never released, so don't expect the same boosts in any source ports either.

There's also 3dnow optimizations from 3dfx's end in their Voodoo2 drivers as well after some point in early 99...

Is there any more specific info on where the AMD people inserted their 3DNow! magic? I can't imagine that they rewrote all the low level functions that where implemented in assembly as this should have maybe given a bigger, more balanced, advantage.