Comment by justsomehnguy
5 hours ago
As someone on the other side... the difference was between 166 "regular" VS 133 MMX. And in less than two years it became irrelevant: '97 for MMX, '99 fo GeForce 256.
5 hours ago
As someone on the other side... the difference was between 166 "regular" VS 133 MMX. And in less than two years it became irrelevant: '97 for MMX, '99 fo GeForce 256.
MMX in did not become irrelevant with the GeForce 256. Hardware video decoding was only in its infancy at the time and even the highest end GPUs only supported motion compensation acceleration for decoding only at best. Non-display image processing on the GPU was heavily bottlenecked by very slow read-back speeds from the GPU to the CPU across the AGP bus.
Well, GPUs in a modern understanding didn't came till GF4/GF4MX, when you could get something for less than $50.. at this moment MMX wasn't anywhere because SSE was. At this point you had an overlay display for the DivX/XviD and your average CPU could display the realtime video.
It came from GF3, which had full vertex and pixel shaders.
Also, the GF4MX was just a GeForce256 in a trenchcoat, and didn't have vertex shaders (at least exposed to software, the T&L engine was still a vertex shader like engine, only the code was all written by nvidia and loaded from ROM).
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