ICR2 - Cyrix 6x86 vs. Intel Pentium?

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

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> 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,

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).

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> 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,

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>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?

I have a Cyrix P166 which clocks at 133mhz. I'm real pleased with it as I got it at a good price. The floating point numbers don't match up with a true P166 and this does have an effect on performance since some sims use floating point rather than interger table lookup for graphics computations. I run nascar with all cars drawn ahead, behind, all sounds on (fm) all graphics on except grass and road textures and get minimum 18fps. Using univbe 2.0 on a diamond 64 vram with Supermicro motherboard, 256k cache 60 ns EDO memory. Prices keep coming down so you may wan't to get a true 166 or maybe Cyrix's P200. Of course that's this month's flavor ;) 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.