Quake, Floating Point, and the Intel Pentium

The transition from mostly 2D games into immersive 3D environments was brought on by none other than the original Quake, making computer game history. At the same time, computer architecture began making a pivotal change from single pipelines into super-scalar. These two simultaneous changes shook up the PC processor market with architectural ramifications that still last till today. This video looks at some of the optimization techniques used by Quake and why it ran so much better on the Intel Pentium than the AMD K6 and Cyrix processors.

Chapters:
0:00 Setting the Stage
2:50 Quake's Shaky Optimizations
4:22 The Point of Floating-Point
7:03 FXCH Swaps the Stack
8:57 More Instructions per Cycle
10:12 FPU Pipelining
13:19 FDIV Overlap
15:28 K6 Deadlock
17:22 The Proof in the Pudding