A Word On SSE-Optimized 3D Games
I received a few games and a few demos that are SSE-optimized. Intel's 'Bug'-Demo shows a bug flying around an area with a very high amount of polygons. This demo runs of course faster with SSE-enabled on a Pentium III. However, the frame counter that's built into this demo shows wrong results, which is why I couldn't use it for any kind of benchmarking. 'Dispatched' is a demo from Rage, particularly written for Intel and the Pentium III. A guy is flying around on a jet ski kind of thing through some nicely done open areas and caves. It is not useful as a benchmark as well though. 'Expendable' is another game from Rage that is SSE-optimized. On a Pentium III the little figures have more shadows and some of the effects are better. However, this can't really push me into buying a Pentium III for this game, since it runs just fine on a Pentium II as well. 'Wargasm' is also supposed to be PIII-optimized, but Intel never told me what kind of difference you see when running it on a Pentium III system. All in all there isn't any screamer game out right now that would particularly benefit from SSE-optimizations. Maybe this will change once Quake Arena is out, but it could also be that games will run just fine without SSE for a long while and Pentium III owners may only see some more fancy features.
