AMD Drops 3DNow! Support From Future CPUs

Barely even knew about this feature, except that I had it, Lol!

This feature started before SSE comes out in Pentium III era

Oh yeah I remember the 3DNow extensions on my old K6-2 CPU from 1998.

Those of you playing still playing Quake 2 (wouldn't blame you) are out of luck.

So my Quake 2 is going to run slightly slower..? /sarcasm

Anyone else thought that AMD/ATI is finally gonna introduce 3D support?

3DNow was huge back in the day... I had a couple of K6-2 cpu's and both ran fairly well... but it looks like it's gone the way of the dinosaurs...

3DNow! has been surpassed by....how many code extensions? And if your software supported 3DNow!, the software will still run, just without the extensions now. Which might be a performance issue....if your software wasn't 15 years old and designed to run on K6-2 CPU's anyways. So the 10% performance hit you take from no 3DNow! will be canceled by the 1000000% performance gain from a modern CPU :-)

^ Exactly.

Things change. 3DNow! served its purpose and that is now behind us. In the day, 3DNow! was cool, but not often used so its passing at a time when CPUs are so much more advanced could have passed without an AMD announcement (except in the old dude SW dev world). BTW, I am one of those old dudes.

This makes sense. There have been so many CPU extensions like SSE that have replaced 3DNow! It's actually a requirement that SSE2 is standard in x64 CPUs

Losing 3Dnow! is not really a big deal. We have all these fast CPU and now even GPU will be able to help crunching numbers really really fast.

but my question is, does it take that much of a resource to "keep" 3Dnow! extension in the CPU logic? or is it causing some of the problems ?

only AMD knows.

Well even though it served it's purpose back in the day I do not think many or if any modern programs use it any longer. So if this makes more die space so AMD can ad other features into their CPU's I am all for it.

I'm sure Quake 2 will run fine still without it..lol

I played the original Half-Life on a K6-2 in 1998. And continued to use it for years with TF and CS. So thanks for the wonderful memories 3DNow!

I actually still have a K6-2+ based Sony Vaio at home with a whopping 256MB of RAM running Puppy Linux. When we bought it for my wife, it was state of the art and came pre-loaded with Windows ME (that was removed within minutes of opening the box and replaced with Win2K).

Even so, if I had to guess, the 3DNow! extensions were likely never used on this machine as it was never used for games.

Regardless, it is cool to discuss these changes in the tech landscape.

wikipedia says "The 3DNow! instruction set was created during the late 1990s when 3D graphics were exploding in popularity because of 3D gaming, and 3D games heavily use floating-point arithmetic."

and i say old

AMD could have easily updated the 3D Now instruction set but for one reason, fusion, any amount of SSE will never come near to the power of a real gfx processor

now i have to wonder if GPGPU does take off, will it make SSE new and old obsolete

As this decision affects backward compatibility, I personally view it as a negative.

No surprise. AMD simpl wasn't extending 3DNow instead they were working wth Intel's SSE and helped extend that once or twice, especially in the AMD64 architecture.

Breaking! Crysis reports 1.2FPS now that AMD has dropped its feature!

Oh, Brings me back.

The reason behind 3DNow and SSE was to improve performance. On the Intel side performance increased by 60% just by adding the instruction sets even on a clock by clock bases with the same core. You all can look up old articles about this or do lot of benchmarking on vintage systems to see it's impact. Modern cpu get most of their performance from SSE while AMD's 3DNow if optimized can see big gains but that is a waste knowing market share. Basically what these instruction sets do is allow the FPU to cheat in certain calculations and reduce the time needed to complete them. Some can be scripted for encryption or multimedia decoding ect. However there are limits and to how much scripting can be done as well the limits of the architecture of the cpu core/s. This is why emulation of different platforms such as Power PC, Amiga, and many game consoles are so difficult.

The First cpu to include such scripting for the improvement of performance was the Zilog Z80.

Sad really, I mean has Intel dropped MMX?

Ahhhhh 3DNow, I'll miss you! Still remember the first time I patched Quake2 with 3dnow update and got like an extra 20fps. Holy crap that was impressive. Bumped my FPH (frags per hour, common measurement back in the day) from like 80-130.

I think people miss the point on this. There's no penalty for losing 3D Now!, because nothing used it. Maybe 12 year old software did, but, I'm pretty sure you're not going to have a big problem running it on x87, on a modern processor.

By the way, x87 and MMX are dead as well. They are not part of x86-64, so can only be used in 32-bit mode. As time goes on, 64-bit will become dominant (just as we see very few Real Mode, or 286 Protected Apps today), so that pretty much all the old instructions will be at least deprecated.

However, the big difference is, x87, 286 Protected (mainly for extended memory support) and Real Mode were extensively used at one point, whereas 3D Now! never received much support, and was quickly supplanted by SSE when it came out, which was superior (mainly because AMD couldn't make the drastic changes Intel could and get industry support), and was backed by a much larger market share.

AMD saved money, and electricity by removing this worthless logic. It's a very good move. I hope they make their x87 unit smaller as well, since SSE2 and later should always be used now, instead of it.