Quake 1 Timedemo Results for Socket 7 Pentium Class

[dan87951]

I had the day off and decided to break out my CPU's and do a little quake timedemo testing between different CPU's and the results were rather interesting. Below is the base system I used:

Asus P5A ATX form factor
256MB Ram
Geforce 2 PRO
6.4GB Drive
Sound Blaster 16
Dos 6.22 and Windows 98 SE

All the CPU's were run at factory settings and all results were done using the "timedemo demo1" command. All CPU's ran the test 3 times and I took there best fps results from that. I was pretty shocked by the Cyrix. I remember as a younger guy there FPU was pretty bad but didn't realize a Pentium 100MHz would knock its socks off. Wow! Kinda wish I had a more K5's and Cyrix's to test..

Pentium 100MHz 10.1fps
AMD K5 100MHz 7.0fps

Pentium 200MHz 16.5fps
AMD K6 200MHz 11.3fps
AMD K6 266MHz 13.5fps

Cyrix 6x86PR166+ 8.2fps
Penitum 133MHz 12.4fps

 

[Unknown_K]

Try a 200/233MMX and see how that does (very common CPU).

 

[dan87951]

I have a 233MMX maybe I will give that a whirl. I'm not expecting much more over the P54C-200MHz (non MMX) I tested.

 

[twolazy]

Surprised the difference between the k2's and p1 200 non mmx. I would have never guessed the p1's fpu was that much more powerful then amds! What gets me is everyone and their mother back when these cpu's were new, would curse Cyrix for a slow fpu. Looking at amd's scores, they are not much better! :O

 

[Unknown_K]

The MMX chips needed special coding to use those extra instructions, but they also had 32K L1 cache compared to normal Pentiums 16K so that should speed games like Quake up a bit.

Both AMD and Cyrix had a much slower FPU section in their Pentium class (which is funny since Cyriz 387 chips were among the fastest in the 386 era). Either Intel knew 3D gaming was around the corner or just got lucky reworking the FPU section when it realy mattered.

Later Cyrix Pentium class CPU's upped the built in cache quite a bit.

Back in the day I switched from a Cyrix 166+ to a Pentium 166 because the former ran too hot, Quake scores went up quite a bit (dumped my 486-160 because Quake came out). The Cyrix 166+ was quite a bit faster in Windows.