Quote:
Originally Posted by str0m
That was way quicker than my 030 50mhz CD32. Definitely playable on that 386!!  |
Sarcasm aside, the 386 DX40 can absolutely do much better than that. Easily 150-300% better framerate, assuming the nonsensical FPU code would be ported to Integer (and single pipe). Abrash himself confessed FP is expensive, and was chosen mostly to save money by not having to mess with fixed-point math, because "hey, why bother if it's there?".
I find it criminally offensive that iD didn't hire some random dude off the street 3 months before the end of the project to port the most critical parts of the pipeline to hand-optimized Integer single-pipeline codepath.
It wouldn't take him more than 6 months, for sure. Just imagine the heaps of cash they were swimming in.
Even if they were cheap, there is no scenario where they would approach the publisher and say -"look, we wanna go play with next-gen tech, but if you hire some dude for 3-6 months, you will get more sales from 486 segment" with the said publisher saying "nah, not worth the $30k".
Not to mention that everybody and their cat was fluent in ASM those days. You could literally go to a supermarket, pick random dude from the crowd and he could do it.
Just
