I don't think any 90s game titles took advantage. I recall Half-Life2 and Doom 3 using it, but those came later.

Munx wrote on 2025-04-19, 12:26:

I don't think any 90s game titles took advantage. I recall Half-Life2 and Doom 3 using it, but those came later.

Almost certainly this, I think it was just much later stuff.

Same as with MMX, the instruction set only started to be widely used by devs once there was a large installed base a few years later. Pentium MMX CPUs were a lot faster than non-MMX, but that was down to the larger L1 cache, not the MMX instructions. There's no such difference between Deschutes and Katmai, so performance was for all intents and purposes identical. Coppermine was faster, but that was due to full-speed L2 cache, not any instruction set changes.

AMD's 3DNow! predated SSE. I think it was sort of a competitor or superset of MMX.
SSE was introduced with Pentium III in late '99, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow!

Later Nvidia drivers such as 45.23 can make use of SSE and even SSE2 if available.

This is apparently helpful in some games like Quake 2:

I don't know how much performance benefit this provides though. I'm guessing you'd have to benchmark a Pentium 3 Katmai 450 vs. Pentium 2 Deschutes 450 to get a somewhat accurate comparison.