That a pretty broad question. Probably the best guess would be any software made before 1999 or so... when the P3 first came out. New software, I'd say almost all games since about 2001 use it. Some programs are optimized for it, but don't require it. Without asking the software vendor if thier product uses it, I'm not sure how you'd know for sure.
 
Jim

i read on a different forum that few programs use sse
 
i thought it was odd

Isn't SSE the AMD implementation of MMX?

Quote:Isn't SSE the AMD implementation of MMX?

No, AMD licenses Intel's MMX and includes it in thier processors since the K6 or K6-2. SSE is an Intel instruction set (mostly optimizing multimedia stuff I think) introduced in the Pentium3. P4's have a newer instruction set as well, SSE2

AMD has a couple special optimizations of thier own. 3DNOW! was one of them was ok, but it never really took off. I'm not sure if they include it in thier processors any more.

Jim

MMX = Intel's optimized integer opcodes.
3DNow! = AMD's answer to MMX, though they ended up just including MMX too.
SSE = Intel's optimized floating-point opcodes. Yes, this can be applied to multimedia, but also anything that uses floating-point code with a lot of parallelism.
 
Xbit has a decent article going into all of these sets:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/prescott-sse.html

Thanks for the clarification!