AFAIK it's much easier to find games which require at least SSE2, because it was adopted by both x86 CPU manufacturers and became de facto standard. Original SSE never had such luxury.

Doom 3 I believe needs SSE, at least on the Intel side (I'd be quite surprised if a Tbird Athlon couldn't run it).
I've tried, without success, to run Doom 3 on a Pentium II machine. PIII-550 (Katmai) worked just fine, if you can call 8 fps with a Radeon 9800 Pro fine. 😜

gta V needs sse 4.2 I found that out when it couldn't run on my q6600

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2020-09-08, 01:57:

Doom 3 I believe needs SSE, at least on the Intel side (I'd be quite surprised if a Tbird Athlon couldn't run it).
I've tried, without success, to run Doom 3 on a Pentium II machine. PIII-550 (Katmai) worked just fine, if you can call 8 fps with a Radeon 9800 Pro fine. 😜

Doom3 ran fine on an Athlon (yeah, low fps doom3 was considered fine in 2004 since it was cutting edge at the time to make the most out of the barely touched features of 4-5 year old video cards), it's actually Quake4 that needs SSE. When it can't find SSE, it'll let you now gracefully at the startup log window without a crash.

F.E.A.R. (released around the same time) might've required SSE too for being the big technological premiere FPS for the '05 fall season. The other big 2005 games (Battlefield 2, Serious Sam 2, Peter Jackson(TM)'s King Kong(R): The Official Video Game(tm) Of The Movie(R), Splinter & Cell: Chao's Theory) worked fine without SSE IIRC.

Athon XP 2400+ does support SSE extensions. I own a 3200+ and ran Doom3, Fear and Far Cry, to name a few, without problems.
Half-life 2 on the other hand, would throw an error message when trying to launch it. It requires SSE2 intructions that the Athlon XP line does not support (unless you get the older pre Steam version of Half-Life2).

Con 2 botones wrote on 2020-09-15, 17:53:

(unless you get the older pre Steam version of Half-Life2).

Doesn't exist. HL2 also could run without SSE in its first few years.

leileilol wrote on 2020-09-16, 00:19:

Con 2 botones wrote on 2020-09-15, 17:53:

(unless you get the older pre Steam version of Half-Life2).

Doesn't exist. HL2 also could run without SSE in its first few years.

Not sure to have understood what thing "doesn´t exist". Anyway, I meant there are (earlier) versions of Half Life 2 that do run on a Athlon XP CPU (with only SSE and not SSE2, as later versions of Half Life 2 require.)

I didn´t know there are also some versions that don´t require even regular SSE, as you stated.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-08, 01:31:

AFAIK it's much easier to find games which require at least SSE2, because it was adopted by both x86 CPU manufacturers and became de facto standard. Original SSE never had such luxury.

Athlons post-Thunderbird had the SSE instruction set. I had an early Athlon MP 1.2 GHz that had it - Palmino core if I remember correctly.

Yes, they had it since Athlon MP release, but Athlon Thunderbird became obsolete around same time as late Athlon XP.

Con 2 botones wrote on 2020-09-17, 13:53:

Not sure to have understood what thing "doesn´t exist".

Half-Life 2 didn't launch before September 2003... and Steam was already looking to be Valve's exclusive platform since Condition Zero. When HL2 finally came out, it was a steam installer with encrypted cache files on discs.

Sudeki. It crashed on intro on my Athlon 1.2 GHz (Thunderbird). I actually ran the game with a debugger to see why. I was getting invalid opcode on XORPS, which is an SSE 1 instruction.

My Athlon 1.4Ghz has no SSE at all, only MMX, 3Dnow and 3Dnowext

That's strange. My Sudeki DVD box does not specify that Athlon XP is required to run.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-18, 11:49:

That's strange. My Sudeki DVD box does not specify that Athlon XP is required to run.

What does it say? Steam says just 1.8GHz which I think is enough to ensure SSE support, while here we have Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz / AMD Athlon XP 1700+.

Pentium III or Athlon CPU 1500 Mhz. Apparently most DVD boxes just listed vague "1.5 Ghz Processor" as minimal spec.

Thunderbirds ended on 1.4 GHz, if I see correctly.
I remember that I was thinking "yeah, my Athlon 1.2 GHz would be slow, but the game should at least run, right?" well.. it didn't.

All Athlon CPUs above 1.5Ghz have SSE so its a safe statement.