"MMX was useless for games. MMX is Integer math only, good for DSP, things like audio filters, or making a softmodem out of your sound card. Unsuitable for accelerating 3D games. Whats worse MMX has no dedicated registers, and instead reuses/shares FPU ones, this means you cant use MMX and FPU (all 3D code pre Direct3D 7 Hardware T&L) at the same time.
...
Funnily enough AMDs 1998 3DNow! did actually add floating point support to MMX and was useful for 3D acceleration until hardware T&L came along 2 years later.
Intel Paid few dev houses to release make believe MMX enhancements, like POD (1997)
1/6 of box covered with Intel MMX advertising while game used it only for some sound effects. Intel repeated this trick in 99 while introducing Pentium 3 with SSE. Intel commissioned Rage Software to build a demo piece showcasing P3 during Comdex Fall. It worked .. by cheating with graphic details ;-) Quoting hardware.fr "But looking closely at the demo, we notice - as you can see on the screenshots - that the SSE version is less detailed than the non-SSE version (see the ground). Intel would you try to roll the journalists in the flour?". Of course Anandtech used this never released publicly cheating demo pretending to be a game in all of their Pentium 3 tests for over a year.
MMX was one of Intel's many Native Signal Processing (NSP) initiatives. They had plenty of ideas for making PCs dependent on Intel hardware, something Nvidia is really good at these days (physx, cuda, hairworks, gameworks). Thankfully Microsoft was quick to kill their other fancy plans https://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/11/11/microsoft_said_drop... Microsoft did the same thing to Creative with Vista killing DirectAudio, out of fear that one company was gripping positional audio monopoly on their platform.
"MMX was useless for games. MMX is Integer math only, good for DSP, things like audio filters, or making a softmodem out of your sound card. Unsuitable for accelerating 3D games. Whats worse MMX has no dedicated registers, and instead reuses/shares FPU ones, this means you cant use MMX and FPU (all 3D code pre Direct3D 7 Hardware T&L) at the same time. ... Funnily enough AMDs 1998 3DNow! did actually add floating point support to MMX and was useful for 3D acceleration until hardware T&L came along 2 years later.
Intel Paid few dev houses to release make believe MMX enhancements, like POD (1997)
https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/51358-pod-windows-...
1/6 of box covered with Intel MMX advertising while game used it only for some sound effects. Intel repeated this trick in 99 while introducing Pentium 3 with SSE. Intel commissioned Rage Software to build a demo piece showcasing P3 during Comdex Fall. It worked .. by cheating with graphic details ;-) Quoting hardware.fr "But looking closely at the demo, we notice - as you can see on the screenshots - that the SSE version is less detailed than the non-SSE version (see the ground). Intel would you try to roll the journalists in the flour?". Of course Anandtech used this never released publicly cheating demo pretending to be a game in all of their Pentium 3 tests for over a year.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=65247&start=20#p... "
MMX was one of Intel's many Native Signal Processing (NSP) initiatives. They had plenty of ideas for making PCs dependent on Intel hardware, something Nvidia is really good at these days (physx, cuda, hairworks, gameworks). Thankfully Microsoft was quick to kill their other fancy plans https://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/11/11/microsoft_said_drop... Microsoft did the same thing to Creative with Vista killing DirectAudio, out of fear that one company was gripping positional audio monopoly on their platform.