The old Pentium 3 enhancements option

[swaaye]

I've always wondered just what the option called "Pentium III enhancements" (or similar) in the original BZ2 release did. Does anyone know?

[GSH]

That enabled SSE code (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions, and note that it's SSE1, not any of the later versions) to accelerate lighting calculations. This produced slightly different tints on objects, something that people either liked or not.

BZ2 1.3pb4a uses (and therefore requires) SSE for all matrix math operations. Users could still choose to use SSE for lighting or not. 1.3ta5 moves lighting calculations off the CPU and onto the GPU, and so the SSE lighting code was removed as unnecessary. And so the option to use SSE or not disappeared. 1.3pb4a and 1.3ta5 require a CPU that supports SSE, something I've not heard any complaints over.

-- GSH

[TheJamsh]

ive heard one... but in all honesty.. buy a system built this century.

[Zero Angel]

ive heard one... but in all honesty.. buy a system built this century.

Lol, exactly. 

[GSH]

To be fair, the original Athlon CPU, while a pretty potent chip in general for the time, didn't do SSE. It was added to the Athlon XP revision of the Athlon, released in October 2001. So, there's a bunch of people with Athlons (up to 1400Mhz) that couldn't run pb4a or newer.

-- GSH

[swaaye]

I've run TA5 on a Pentium III 1400 with a Radeon 8500 and it ran very well. As in completely fluidly. How retro can you go? That hardware is from 2001 or so. It's only about a year newer than the game itself!

TA5 is really quite amazing IMO. Offloading work to the GPU makes the game less demanding than ever before.

That enabled SSE code (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions, and note that it's SSE1, not any of the later versions) to accelerate lighting calculations. This produced slightly different tints on objects, something that people either liked or not.

I remember when I originally got BZ2 and I had a early PIII 450. I played with this option and didn't notice much speed change or anything. But I did notice that rendering changed slightly, just by watching the paused scene behind the options menu. I kinda wondered if the option was primarily there to please Intel as a sponsor.

[Zero Angel]

The original Athlon 'thunderbird' was faster than a similarly clocked PIII, and it was cheaper too. I used to own one and compared to anything else at the time things would just fly. It was my first real bz2 playing machine and even with the crappy geforce2, I could get about 60FPS on medium-low settings (everything turned off except high sky and medium texture/detail settings) and 30 on medium-high (without lighting, reflections and localfog -- but everything else maxed)

[swaaye]

The original Athlon 'thunderbird' was faster than a similarly clocked PIII, and it was cheaper too. I used to own one and compared to anything else at the time things would just fly. It was my first real bz2 playing machine and even with the crappy geforce2, I could get about 60FPS on low settings.

Oh of course TBird was a great CPU. I actually had a Duron 800 @ 1000 for a year or so back then. It's just that today people should probably move on from such hardware and not ask voluntary developers to make their code compatible with it. IMO anyway.

Although I did originally play BZ2 on a PIII 450 with a Matrox G400.

[Zero Angel]

Yea I agree. It seems that a vast majority of BZ2 players are using Pentium III/Athlon XP or newer anyways.

[Avatar]

Hey...

I'm on an Athlon XP 2000+, 1.67Ghz with 2G of DDR, and an AGP GForce 6200.  BZ2 runs very well on it...

I have half of a Duo-core system built, just waiting for a free paycheck to move up to something a little more powerful...   

-Av-

[swaaye]

I'm using a Athlon XP 2000+ as a TVPC. It has only 1GB but has a GeForce 7300 GT.

[bb1]

Aww, you can up that to a 7600 for dirt cheap nowaday.

Better yet, try to find some mainstream-low end 8's or 9's. Nvidia's trying to push that stock like nobody's business.

[Zero Angel]

I'd go with an ATI card if I wasn't serious about running linux. The HD series are pretty good for low-end cards, sort of like how Athlons were back in the day, cheaper AND faster.

[TheJamsh]

yeh i've got a mobility radeon HD2600 in my laptop. Its actually really good. Handle's much higher settings much smoother than my nVidia GeForce 7600 LE.

[bb1]

I hit the benchmarks before I hit the shelves.

Phenom VS Core II was a nightmare for AMD, Phenom II vs i7 was lesser so but they still need that extra push to gain the edge. I'll be reeling when Bulldozer is out. I hope.

Same thing with the benchmarks on nvidia cards and ATI. For the same price and demographic, Nvidia usually wins. Crunch time comes around and ATI does what? Staples two cards together.