🚀 go-pugleaf

B. Scott Bilas (sco...@iastate.edu) wrote:
| I do the same -- full screen low res.  And I've got a 33DX.  It's mostly 
| bearable unless I get into some heavy action in multiplayer mode.  But as for 
| the FPU use, I can't imagine why anybody would use floating point graphics 
| routines.  Judging from the speed of Doom I'd bet that it's mostly 32-bit 
| integer math.  Take a look at any version of Fractint for DOS for a good 
| example of the speed difference.  That's pure integer math (up to a certain 
| resolution).  And it's faster than any floating point fractal programs.  
| However, if Doom truly does use the FPU, I'd love to see it run on a Pentium 
| system.  The pipelined Pentium FPU is supposed to be 4 times faster than a 
| 486-66!

On my 486DX, there isn't all that much difference in calculation time
between integer versus floating point on Fractint; perhaps a 25% or so
slowdown.  If you're doing floating point emulation in software, I agree
you'll see a very significant slowdown -- but having the FP hardware helps
out a lot.  (And Intel even admits that the floating point unit on the
486's is "dog meat".)

BTW, an earlier poster in this thread made reference to the size of the
486 internal cache being 1k.  It's actually 8k -- although don't the
Cyrix 486's have a smaller cache?

--
Ed Haymore   |   AA6EJ
e...@byu.edu   |   Es perillos abocar-se.