alt Hacker NewsYou can find a lot of discussion about what the minimum specs for Quake are. Famously, it needs a decent FPU, and the Pentium was a convenient early CPU with a decent built-in FPU. It was significantly faster than a 486.
…But people have managed to run Quake on the 486.
And the myth people tell about Quake is that it killed Cyrix, because Quake performance on Cyrix was subpar. But was that true? And if it was true, was that because the Cyrix was slower than a Pentium, or was it because the Quake code had assembly that was hand-optimized for the Pentium FPU pipeline?
Anyway. “Most simple computer that could run Quake” is probably going to include a decent FPU. If you are implementing something on an FPGA, you can probably get somewhere around 200 MHz clock anyway. At which point you can run Quake II.
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My perspective from being a teen doing lan party stuff at the time: Quake ran slow on them, but it was far from the only thing that ran slow. Cyrix was well understood to be the value brand for general office apps and such, but not up to it for more demanding computing, and for having random compatibility issues here and there.
Ultimately what killed Cyrix is they just couldn't offer enough of a discount vs intel to matter, especially with all the lock in stuff intel was doing with Dell, Gateway, etc.
Intel Inside was a successful marketing campaign as well. If you were around back then I bet you can imagine the jingle/chord immediately.
I had a Cyrix 6x86 when Quake first came out. My disappointment at how poorly Quake ran on it was significant, especially because pretty much every other game at the time ran well on the Cyrix. The FPU performance in Quake was doubly handicapped on the Cyrix: not only was its FPU slower than the Pentium's to begin with, Quake's code was indeed hand-optimized for the Pentium's FPU pipeline. Fabien Sanglard's writeup of Michael Abrash's optimizations for Quake goes into great detail: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_asm_optimizations/
can it be rewritten to use fixed point arithmetic instead?
Quake ran like shit on 486dx33, a few fps at best.
The Cyrix story is actually well-documented. Quake's software renderer used hand-optimized x86 assembly with FPU instruction sequences specifically tuned for the Pentium's pipeline. Cyrix processors had a different FPU execution pipeline that stalled on those specific instruction orderings — the issue wasn't raw FPU performance, it was that the Pentium-optimized code ran slower on Cyrix than straightforward C code would have. It was hand-optimization that made things worse, not better, on a competitor's hardware.
The timing was brutal for Cyrix. This was right when "Intel Inside" was becoming a meaningful consumer brand signal, and game benchmarks were becoming the primary way consumers evaluated CPU purchases. Quake wasn't just a game, it was the benchmark everyone ran at CompUSA to compare machines. Being demonstrably worse at Quake, regardless of the cause, was a marketing catastrophe.
The real floor for running Quake is basically "does it have a hardware FPU." The 486 DX (with FPU) could do it at low resolution and low framerate. The 486 SX (no FPU, software float emulation) was genuinely painful. The Pentium was the first CPU where it actually felt good.