nfortunately, if the early MMX demos are any indication (and there are some reasons to believe that they might not be a perfectly fair example), even game titles ported to MMX are no match for a nice 3DFX or Rendition card. The demos we tried, including G-NOME, POD, and Rebel Moon, simply could not match the quality or speed of games dedicated to consumer 3-D chips. G-NOME essentially looked like a very poor man's MechWarrior 2 - the same type of tank-like character roaming around shooting enemies, except the textures were not nearly as rich as the original.

 POD proved to be the most enlightening demo, as a version exists for non-MMX, MMX, and machines equipped with a 3DFX board. Playing the game with a 3DFX board was no comparison to the other two configurations - beautiful textures would race by at lightening speeds. Removing the 3DFX board from the mixture proved quite drastic. The MMX-only version did not look nearly as good, while playing the vanilla version of the game looked only slightly worse. In other words, the impact of MMX alone was minimal, while the impact of the 3DFX board was monstrous. Rebel Moon, a not very good Doom-like shoot-em-up title, didn't improve that much with MMX either.

 Loyd Case, for Computer Gaming World, points out that upgrading a PC to an MMX version can improve gameplay significantly. However, the addition of a 3-D accelerator is almost a necessity in most cases to achieve peak performance.

 These results really shouldn't be much of a surprise. To use MMX for today's games in the hopes of vast performance improvements is a bit like trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. Sure, more processing power can and will help gameplay, but it won't help nearly as much as a dedicated rendering controller will when applied to today's most popular titles.

 Intel, with the announcement of its 740 3D chip, has essentially agreed that games cannot live by MMX alone. By introducing its own dedicated low-end 3-D rendering controller, Intel has basically copped to the fact that MMX alone simply won't do for the game market. The new chip will debut with the Pentium II processor in the second half of 1997 and should provide fill rates required by today's titles.

 However, one game vendor, Epic MegaGames, thinks that MMX will definitely enhance gameplay. Craig Lafferty, Epic's PR/Marketing Coordinator, claims that MMX's ability to process true color graphics at virtually the same speed as 8-bit graphics, coupled with far more efficient audio processing, will lead to some very exciting game development, particularly in the 2-D realm. Epic plans to soon release three titles with MMX enhancements, including Jazz Jackrabbit 2, a game similar to Sonic The Hedgehog; 7th Legion, a strategy game; and, of course, Unreal, Epic's version of the 3-D first-person shootout. This final example should prove quite interesting. We all know that Doom and Quake started out as DOS titles that ran terrifically without any extra hardware acceleration. Now with GL and VQuake, though, and titles such as Tomb Raider being ported straight to 3-D ASICS, we've become quite spoiled with some extremely fast and very rich scenery. Can an MMX-only version of Unreal compete? We doubt it.

 One also has to wonder whether or not better quality audio and more than 16-bit color will really add to the gaming experience. It seems that a decent 16-bit sound card, solid speakers, and a video card that can really fill textures at 16-bit color mode are plenty. Any improvements would come from slamming more textures around than ever before (i.e., better rendering controllers), not adding more color bit depth and sound.

 It's a bit difficult to know just where Epic MegaGames stands on this issue. Although Epic may praise the performance enhancements made possible by MMX, it is aware that MMX working alongside a 3-D controller is the ideal setup.