As someone on the other side... the difference was between 166 "regular" VS 133 MMX. And in less than two years it became irrelevant: '97 for MMX, '99 fo GeForce 256.

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ack_complete 4 hours ago | parent [-]

MMX in did not become irrelevant with the GeForce 256. Hardware video decoding was only in its infancy at the time and even the highest end GPUs only supported motion compensation acceleration for decoding only at best. Non-display image processing on the GPU was heavily bottlenecked by very slow read-back speeds from the GPU to the CPU across the AGP bus.

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justsomehnguy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, GPUs in a modern understanding didn't came till GF4/GF4MX, when you could get something for less than $50.. at this moment MMX wasn't anywhere because SSE was. At this point you had an overlay display for the DivX/XviD and your average CPU could display the realtime video.

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monocasa 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It came from GF3, which had full vertex and pixel shaders.

Also, the GF4MX was just a GeForce256 in a trenchcoat, and didn't have vertex shaders (at least exposed to software, the T&L engine was still a vertex shader like engine, only the code was all written by nvidia and loaded from ROM).

	▲	justsomehnguy 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well yes but no. GF3 was a very short lived product, even more short lived than GF2MX. And the crucial thing here is what at the time of GF/GF2 you still could buy a computer without a proper[0] 3D and video output acceleration[1], but by the time of GF4MX (which is GF2MX on the booster shoes and VPE - and only a year and half later at the worst) you have no option not to get a full package. SIS died, 3Dfx died even earlier, S3 became irrelevant and Intel was for the button pushers till i945 - which came only in 2005. And while at first the price even for GF4MX420 was ~$100 it did two things: - pushed the price for GF2MX series well below $50 (and quite soon followed the suit) so anything now had DX7 level 3D on-board - pushed the price for every other 3D accelerator waaay down - made MPEG and video acceleration the default in everything [0] emphasis on the 'proper' [1] though you needed to get out of the way to do so, eg i815, G450 - but you could!