[rzzzt]

There was an expression floating around for this naming scheme, but I can't remember what it was and don't find any good search results either for my candidates. "Processor/Pentium equivalent rating"?

Edit: found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Rating

[iggldiggl]

This actually caused some problems with some Maxis/EA games at the time (like Sim City 4 or The Sims 2), because those games automatically tuned certain settings (mostly graphics settings, but somewhat annoyingly in The Sims also things like the maximum number of sims on one lot) depending on the power of your computer – mostly as measured by GPU model, amount of system and video RAM and CPU clock speed.

The problem was that the CPU clock speed levels categorising your system as high/mid/low performance were quite obviously based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, even though at the time AMD actually had a market share of around 40 – 50 % for desktop computers. This meant that everybody with an AMD processor would find his/her performance and graphics settings mysteriously restricted. People using the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors had similar problems if they were still playing those games a few years later.

The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – things were controlled by a rules file in a plain text-based format, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor.

This was also useful because the GPU detection had its own share of problems down the line – I still occasionally play Sim City 4, and for some reason or other on my current system the game doesn't correctly detect the amount of video RAM I have and therefore resorts to extremely restrictive fallback settings unless I manually override it, and AMD recycling graphics card model numbers also caused some confusion that had to be manually fixed.