Here are a few recent technologies that greatly improved upon the perceptible in-game quality along with a rating from one to ten in the volume of software that supports it and has actually been delivered to market at this time: (with 1 being the worst, and 10 being best)
Bump Mapping:
Intel's SSE SIMD Instructions:
AMD's 3Dnow! Instructions:
S3's Texture Compression:
Anisotropic Filtering:
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3
1
5
0
1
|
Readers looking at this list likely remember the much deserved hype and PR surrounding the development of each of the technologies listed above, only to be discouraged by the lack of software that's actually available that uses it.
It's even scarier when you take into consideration how long some of the hardware acceleration techniques above have been available to developers, AMD's 3Dnow! is probably the oldest at roughly 10 - 16 months yet most AMD K6-2 owners still voice complaints at the lack of support for the impressive optimization set. This is even after millions of K6-2 CPUs have been sold the past year and a half.
Taking all of this into consideration, how long will it be before we see applications that allow for some Athlon-specific optimization improvements in real world entertainment applications?
History seems to answer this question with the statement "one hell of a long time". And by that time, Intel will likely be fielding a CPU that is able to closely match the Athlon's current superiority level as even Intel's improved Coppermine P3s are only two months away from release (late October/99).
By the time we see games that can take advantage of larger L1 cache amounts and multiple simultaneous FPU instructions, both the debut Athlon and Coppermine CPUs will already be dated.
Yes!
As doom and gloom as the fact that most cutting edge hardware technology is lost on games due to games having massive development timelines that make the new technology obsolete when the game finally arrives, there are a few areas where an AMD Athlon 600 CPU will perform to its true potential right now.