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Comment by sonar_un | Hacker News Reader

I had one of these (The SX), it was AWFUL! I couldn't even play games that required the math co-processor. I ended up upgrading the processor to one of those Evergreen ones. Worked like a dream. I wish I can remember which game wouldn't run. I believe it was the original Demolition Derby?

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Really? I also had 486SX and the only time I needed the co-processor was when I wanted to run some 3D software (mostly 3D Studio). And for it to work the only thing I needed was coprocessor emulator. In case of games it wouldn't probably be a viable solution as it was obviously slower than the real thing.

Also used the coprocessor emulator for 3D Studio, nearly had forgot how that went till I read this post. Now I work on two quad core workstations and some stuff needs to go to a render farm in the states. What a flashback. :)

Quake just about ran on a 486DX, but failed completely on a 486SX.

Quake was, IIRC, the first mass market game which used the floating point unit. 486SX owners just couldn't run it. It also suffered more than most games on 486es and non-Intel chips, since the Pentium FPU was streets ahead of any other x86 chip at the time.

http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_interview_1997... (search for "float")

I had a 486DX-50 at the time, the fastest chip ever produced in the series with a 1:1 clock ratio, and it couldn't really run Quake. The FPU wasn't designed to be exercised much, probably intended for light-duty use. In practice it behaved like an "embedded co-processor".

A Pentium 75, perhaps the slowest Pentium ever made, was at least ten times faster because of the floating point gains.

Well that's to be expected, 3D graphics usually uses floating-point vector math.

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