The question about floating point

[FantasySoul]

how is a floating point of the CPU influnce the performance of 3D gaming?

[DilLy]

The more floating point operations a cpu can do, the better your gaming should be. Stick with P4 or the Athlon XP and you should have plenty of floating point operations.

[Xayd]

From my understanding, in layman's terms, the floating point processor on the CPU handles instructions that aren't hard coded, a sort of "everything else" processor.

Games are really nothing but a series of fast calculations (you shot a rocket from points on this X axis and that Y axis and this other Z axis, calculate it's path and where it lands, then figure the X,Y, and Z locations of the person you shot it at and see if it hit or missed, all within about 0.3 seconds :p).

[Nuclear Krusader]

I doubt you would be able to play 3D games without floating point.

[wilsontc]

durons have crap floating points compared to a P4 or an XP.
but what about the thunderbird?
how do they rack up?

[Xayd]

I haven't looked at benchmarks recently, but with the early P4s, the Athlon line outperformed Intel floating-point wise.

But, Intel now has a relatively cheap x86 CPU with a 512k cache that is very overclockable compared to the Athlon too, so the choices between the two aren't so easy to make anymore.

[TwoRails]

The T-Bird does pretty good for FP calcs.