"SharkD" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> I just installed the latest beta on my Vista machine and notices that it uses
> the SSE2 executable by default. I'm not sure what SSE2 is. Should I be using
> it? The machine has a dual core processor.

In a nutshell, SSE2 is a processor feature that allows to do faster number
crunching (provided that programs are optimized to use it, which the
SSE2-binary of PoV ray is).

So yes, you *do* want it.


In a slightly bigger nutshell, SSE2 is a processor extension to speed up vector
math, by providing commands to apply a basic operation - like multiplication or
addition - to multiple numbers at the same time, and other handy things like a
combined multiply-add command which is a great help for matrix operations.

So it's a kind of parallel processing on a very small scale (which you get on
top of the large-scale parallel processing provided by the dual core).

The older SSE did basically the same, but only for vectors comprised of
single-precision floats or integers, which is not enough for PoV-ray; SSE2 does
this for the double-precision floating points used by PoV-ray.

Post a reply to this message