"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:40693a11@news.povray.org...
> Chambers <bdc### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> > Did you know that, for instance, the FPU registers
> > load so fast that games used them to load bitmaps from regular memory to
> > video memory?  It worked about 30% faster than a standard transfer.
>
>   This was a very widespread urban legend back in the time when Quake
> was new.
>   The fact is that it's not true. You can test with pentiums of that time
> that copying data from RAM to the video memory is not any faster using
> the FPU (yes, I *did* test it explicitly instead of just trusting
> internet rumors).


Well, I never had a straight pentium to test with, but I verified myself
that it was true of the 486 line (after that I went to a K6 with MMX).

-- 
...Chambers
http://www.geocities.com/bdchambers79

Post a reply to this message