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).

-- 
plane{-x+y,-1pigment{bozo color_map{[0rgb x][1rgb x+y]}turbulence 1}}
sphere{0,2pigment{rgbt 1}interior{media{emission 1density{spherical
density_map{[0rgb 0][.5rgb<1,.5>][1rgb 1]}turbulence.9}}}scale
<1,1,3>hollow}text{ttf"timrom""Warp".1,0translate<-1,-.1,2>}//  - Warp -

Post a reply to this message