rec.autos.simulators

I'm contemplating an upgrade for my lowly 486dx2/66 system to Pentium
level, and was wondering if anyone knew if the Cyrix 6x86s were close
to the genuine Intel Pentium processors in their ability to run IndyCar
Racing II.  There's apparently parity on most benchmarks, say between
the 133Mhz Cyrix chip (labeled 150+) and a Pentium 150 MHz, but there's
soem talk that floating point is not as comparable.  Does that affect
the ability to render graphics at reasonable frame rates?  Is anyone
running such combinations that might have some observations?

Thanks,

The 120MHz 686 is comparable to the P5-150 (slightly faster, supposedly),
the 133MHz 686 is comparable to the P5-166.

I bought a 120 (150+) recently and will be assembling the system this
weekend.  I'll let you know how it benchmarks.  I don't have ICRII,
though, so I won't be able to help out with that :)

I'm hoping NFS cooks along, though. I've put the machine together
specifically for GP2, NFS and Quake.  We'll see :)

Regards,
  Keith

I dug out some info somewhere on the net, where in DOS Games, the Cyrix
P133+ performed slower than the Intel 133. Here's what I found from an
Altavista search:

Identical configurations (all I do is swap the CPU out and change the
    jumper for clock rate). TS54P AIO motherboard (with 6x86 bios support,
    advanced features o* #9 motion771 video (S3-968 chipset) 2MB VRAM, 32
    MB 60ns RAM, GUS soundcard. 25* PB cache on motherboard.

    Doom v1.9 (ultimate doom) -timedemo demo3:
    Screen at maximum size, no status bars shown. Hi res, kbd control
only.

    Processor       Gameticks       RealTicks       FPS (35*gt/rt)
    6x86-100        3863            2939            46.00
    6x86-120        3863            2453            55.12
    Pentium-133     3863            2354            57.43

    Quaketest 1, DOS version, UNIVBE loaded (no univbe above, my eval
    period ran out when I ran the test), same machine configuration:

    Processor       TIMEREFRESH reported FPS
    6x86-100        21
    6x86-120        26
    Pentium-133     46

    (the 6x86-120, in both cases, is actually a -100 overclocked to 120,
my
    6x86 wo* even boot at 133, otherwise I'd report numbers for that too).

Jeff

I recently got the same setup here, and I'm real pleased with it as
well.  I seem to get much better preformance on nascar though. I have
EVERYTHING maxed out with a min frame rate set to 20 and max to 25
fps. I usually lose only the asphalt texture and rarely the grass as
well, and then only in heavy traffic or on the big tracks like dega.
The only difference is that I have a Matrox Millenium video, but I
still have 16 Mb of 70 ns ( non EDO ) memory. You can't beat it for
the price.