Intel 80486 - Gaming

Gaming

The 486DX2 66 MHz processor was popular with many players of video games during the early to mid 1990s, toward the end of the MS-DOS gaming era. It was often coupled with a VESA Local Bus video card.

The introduction of 3D computer graphics spelled the end of the 486's reign, because 3D graphics make heavy use of floating point calculations, need faster CPU cache and more memory bandwidth. Developers began to target the P5 Pentium processor family almost exclusively with x86 assembly language optimizations (e.g., Quake) which led to the usage of terms like "Pentium compatible processor" for software requirements. Many of these games required the speed of the P5 Pentium processor family's double-pipelined architecture.