On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 10:26:51AM -0600, Joseph D. Wagner wrote:
They're optimized for pentium4, but use the i386 instruction set.
There are instructions which have come out since the 386, like MMX, that could improve the performance of programs. In this case, graphics programs.
Many graphics programs test for features such as mmx/3dnow/sse at runtime and run alternative hand-written assembly routines when present. This way the program runs on any x86 platform regardless of featureset without needing to be compiled for a specific variant.
Why should my graphics programs suffer because some fool is running a 20 year old computer?
You forgot to attach the benchmarks showing the improvements.
For a large percentage of the packages shipped in Fedora, RPMs 'optimised' for >386 just won't be noticable.
Dave