>In a PC or in other Quake ports, all the data is available from RAM (if not even from the CPU data cache), which had a relatively high bandwidth and low latency even back to 1996. In fact, the bandwidth for sequential reads varied a lot but with a 40 MHz EDO 64-bit DRAM (already available on 1996) one could get a maximum throughput of 320 MB/s.
The youth, so sweet and naive :) EDO ram on average Pentium motherboard does around 50-70MB/s. 256-1024KB of L2 cache bumps that to 70-120MB/s depending on chipset and cache type (and obviously usage pattern, Quake wasnt optimized on that aspect at all). Tiny 8KB of L1 below 200MB/s.
The youth, so sweet and naive :) EDO ram on average Pentium motherboard does around 50-70MB/s. 256-1024KB of L2 cache bumps that to 70-120MB/s depending on chipset and cache type (and obviously usage pattern, Quake wasnt optimized on that aspect at all). Tiny 8KB of L1 below 200MB/s.