Brian Hook (ventje van id Software) heeft in z'n .plan geupdate met wat info over de nieuwe SIMD (KNI) instructies van de PIII en de toepassing ervan in Quake3 Arena:
We would like to have 3DNow! and KNI (or whatever it's called these days) support out of the box, and I believe that we are intending to support these SIMD instruction sets, however we simply can't GUARANTEE it at this point. A patch will definitely be released if necessary with the requisite support, however.However, for you 3DNow! users -- Quake3 runs just fine on a 3DNow! box such as the AMD K6-2!!! It runs slower than a comparable Intel, but faster than a comparable Cyrix. But it is by no means unplayable.
Floating point really comes into play in two key areas: OpenGL driver throughput and client/server game code. Right now, BY FAR, the OpenGL driver is consuming the most time, sometimes up to 75% of the overall execution of the program. This means that whatever SIMD optimizations we do pursue will not have NEAR the impact of SIMD optimizations within the OpenGL driver.
Your time is better served lobbying your video card driver manufacturers for 3DNow and KNI support. This will net, by far, the most gains in overall performance for the majority of users with PIII and K6 systems.
K7 should run great out of the box, with or without 3DNow! support
