I still remember these massive performance jumps you could get around the turn of the millennium. First it was Pentium 166 MMX (SIMD FP math), then it was 3dfx Voodoo, then it was GeForce 256 (hardware T&L) and AMD Athlon Thunderbird (just blasting past anything Intel could offer).
MMX wasn’t actually that useful. The vectors were only 64 bits wide, you had no float support and the supported operations were kind of uneven... SSE and especially SSE2 were a much bigger leap.
what gave the pentium mmx the big speed boost (I also remember it being quite significant) was probably the bigger 16kb cache (pentium classic had only 8kb) rather than mmx itself.
Quake2 with a K6-2 and Voodoo2 was a kickass combo. At some point iD software released the 3DNow! patch for Quake2 which yielded yet another 10 FPS....good times.
