Comment by EvanAnderson

> Cycle accurate emulation helps little with this era PC demos, because back in 1993 PC hardware performance variation was already massive.

Absolutely

"How much of the sword emerged from the water" in Second Reality was a good measurement of CPU speed and video card performance, for example.

I remember seeing stuff in demos on my friend's Pentium Pro machine that I never saw on my 486SX-25 because routines ran faster and you could see more of the effect (since some demos were sync'd to the music and would move on irrespective of the progress of the effects). Heck-- just replacing my video card made a huge difference with some demos.