Overview

• Plummer called the runaway render loop in his Windows NT port of 3D Pinball the worst Windows bug he shipped.
• He had built a new video and audio engine around the original game logic after converting chunks of assembly to C.
• On the 200 MHz MIPS R4000 development hardware the game ran about 60–90 fps, which masked the missing frame limiter.
• As PCs grew faster and multi-core became common, the game rendered at extreme rates—reportedly around 5,000 fps—and could consume an entire core.
• Raymond Chen traced the issue to the lack of a frame cap and set a 100 fps limit, with reported CPU usage dropping to roughly one percent.