Sharky Extreme has seen and tested a wide variety of CPUs during the past six months including the Celeron 366, 400, 433, 466, the AMD K6-3 400, and the P3-450, 500 and now 550 models.

During those hundreds if not thousands of benchmarks, we've gotten a good look at exactly where a certain CPU needs to be to hit a certain frame rate in our favorite tests. Thanks to SSE however, those expectations have changed. SSE is beginning to deliver in the way that die-hard performance freaks had hoped it would when it was hyped by Intel's PR department last year: Higher in-game frame rates.

Much higher.

The first benchmark we've tested with that fully supports the SSE instructionset in a Direct3D grpahics engine-based environment is 3DMark99 MAX from FutureMark Inc.

3DMark99 MAX's benchmark results show tangible benefits from the activation of SSE within both its 3rd person racing game simulation as well as its 1st person shooter routine, both of which measure frames per second over a fixed time period.

The performance gain we recorded ranged from 20% - 35% versus when SSE support was disabled within the same testing conditions at the same CPU MHz level, at multiple resolutions. Be sure to check out the "Synthetic Benchmark Results" graph we've provided in our benchmark section, it gives a good visual idea exactly how powerful SSE can be.

SSE is clearly for real, and as we enter the second half of 1999 its value will become clearer as newer games are released from top tier software developers.