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IIRC the fastest base 486 (out of the box without trickery) was 50MHz. There was a DX2-66 (and DX2-50, which ran clock doubled with the rest of the motherboard at 25MHz). There was also the DX4 which despite the name was only click tripled, running as fast as 100MHz of a 33.3MHz. Other manufacturers produced faster clocked i486 compatible processors: I had an AMD 5x86 which was actually quad-clocked, running at 133MHz internally. For tight loops where the code and enough data for a fair few cycles fitted into its on-chip cache (something like 8K code & 8K data?) these were surprisingly speedy compared to Intel's 486s and even low-end (66MHz, and in some artificial tests 75MHz) Pentiums. Cyrix had some similar models that were quicker still for integer work, and IIRC cheaper so even better VFM for sure tasks, but had abysmal floating-point performance which was rapidly becoming pretty important for games around that time.

Doom used integer maths throughout, so would not benefit from and FPU, but did get a boost in complex maps from the faster internal clocks of doubled/tripled/quadded chips. The Quake era (maybe a little earlier for some more niche games like certain fight simulators) is when the FPU became a massively significant factor for home use (though it didn't exclusive use it: the original Pentiums' FPU wasn't trials fast enough so only something like 1/16th of the work was done there and integer approximations starting from those values were used between - improved further by the FPU being able to work on its next bits while the CPU ALUs could do there part, a hack somewhere between pipelining which 486+ units did naturally (& Pentiums more so due to extra ALU circuitry) and hyperthreading).




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