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When did floating point performance become irrelevant?
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 5:11 am
by invictius
Someone said that with vanilla, amd cpus (486-k62) would give better performance than intel due to their floating point performance. Was this only for vanilla? And if not, what cpu's started making it irrelevant?
Re: When did floating point performance become irrelevant?
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 5:46 am
by Graf Zahl
It has mostly become irrelevant when the math coprocessors became standard equipment. Doom has been written right at the time when this wasn't the case. A first generation Pentium would have been more than suifficient to run a floating point version of the Doom engine.
Of course back then fixed point was indeed faster, but not by factors which would have made it a problem.