rec.autos.simulators

A lot of people have been posting that they recently purchased or built
a machine with a P200-MMX chip.  All discussion seems center around the
video cards still.  GP2 uses the CPU for a lot of it's graphics
calculations and certainly doesn't utilise any 3-D effects or hardware
accelleration.  The reason these machines get good frame rates (ie. 25+)
is because first, the chip runs at 200mHz, and secondly it is because
MMX chips have twice the L1 cache built in then a standard P5 chip.  It
is this increased cache and only the increased cache that is responsible
for the performance boost.  It gives everything an average boost of 16%
- 18%.  Also, the game doesn't utilize any memory (RAM) over 32MEGs.

As for video cards, the best for this particular game are still 64 and
128-bit cards with 2 MEGs or more memory and no 3-D effects.  Hopefully
this will change with either an update to GP2 or with the release of
GP3(??).

Seems like the Cyrix chip kills Intel for GP2 performance.
However, Cyrix gets crushed by Intel for N2 and IC2 performance.

MMX shouldn't make a difference since neither game is enhanced.

Richard Scott

Obviously Richard didn't read my post before he responded to it.  MMX
should make a difference because of the simple fact that the internal
cahce has been doubled in the new chip.  If Richard started using twice
as much of his brain as he uses now, we'd expect his synaptic functions
to improve, would we not?

Well, this depends on your definition of MMX.  No, the MMX instruction
set will not help any of these games in their present form.  However,
the Intel MMX chips have double the internal cache of the "classic"
chips.  This increase is generally considered to give about a 10-15%
performance boost as compared to the chip with the lower clock speed for
most programs.  So a Pentium 200 MMX is better for these games than a
Pentium 200 Classic.  (Note that cache is very important for these
games.)