DOS ain't dead

Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 18.01.2026, 16:46

> And on old 486DLC @40MHz
> original doom: 11.700 FPS
> djdoom: 12.414 FPS
> Doom8088/386/VGA-hi: 20.724 FPS

IIRC, GCC never did anything for 486 besides adding extra alignment to the 386 output (since 486s were very sensitive).

Realistically, what else could be done for 486? Supposedly they preferred more RISC-y code (unlike 386 that preferred densely packed CISC instructions) due to pipelining. Maybe also avoid AGI (address generation interlock?), not sure.

Granted, the 486 was twice as fast as the 386 at the same clock speed, so there's clearly room for optimizations. But I guess just conflating it as a faster 386 is easier.

However, for comparison, I think GCC had much better support for Pentium 4.

Complete thread:

• Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 - Rugxulo, 11.01.2026, 20:06 (Miscellaneous)
  • Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 - Guti, 12.01.2026, 17:08
    • Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 - RayeR, 13.01.2026, 22:43
  • Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 - RayeR, 15.01.2026, 08:04
    • Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 - RayeR, 18.01.2026, 16:07
      • Doom: DJGPP vs Watcom vs. Digital Mars vs. CC386 - Rugxulo, 18.01.2026, 16:46