Comment by pferde
1 day ago
Oh yes. I remember first playing Quake on a 486 and not liking it, because it felt like I was moving in a heavy sluggish tank, and later playing it on a Pentium, and loving it for the agile movement. The difference was huge!
Quake was notorious for being the first major game to require a powerful FPU. Michael Abrash manually tuned the rasterization code to fit the Pentium pipeline, any other CPU didn't cut it.
IIRC it came down to something crazy simple, like, using the FPU registers to bit-blit was the fastest way, but only on the genuine Intel Pentium.
I recall we got it running pretty decently on an upper end 486 (DX4 100). That, and Winamp. Good times.
So many modern games have such a clunky movement in comparison.