MMX helped a lot here, I remember my Pentium MMX 233 had no trouble playing games and playing music. To give you an idea of how crapy that machine was otherwise... it was a Packard Bell with an onboard ATI chip that barely qualified for 3D acceleration. The Pentium 166 (non-MMX) we had would chug on things that the MMX just didn't care about.

> I had to minimize throttle priority on my web browser because smooth scrolling requires a ton of juice. Still does to this day looking at power consumption on an iPhone.

This still to this day amuses me. Metal and DX12 both have calls designed to support this natively on the GPU by allowing the application to shift the rendered area of a very specific box (without rerendering the entire screen) and then render behind in the blank. As far as I know only Safari on iOS does this even close to properly and even then it has other iOS Safari related quirks around that that Apple refuses to fix.