On Sun, 01 Nov 1998 03:31:21 +0200, Margus Ramst <mar### [at] peakeduee>
wrote:

>As far as I know, 3DNow technology does not (and cannot) have any effect on
>raytracers like POV (just like 3D accelerator cards). It only affects 3D games,
>(possibly) VRML and other such stuff. These things are very different from
>raytracing.

Actually, 3DNow could help POV-Ray in a few places.  3DNow is just
floating point operations on more than one operand at a time, it's not
hardware acceleration of triangle drawing as found on a video card.
However, to get any real use out of it you'd have to really tweak the
POV code, at the expense of portability.  On top of that, no
mainstream compilers currently support the 3DNow instruction set.  

Optimizing for the K6-2's specific architecture would probably gain
you more performance than supporting 3DNow.  But again, finding a
compiler that knows how to optimize for a K6-2 would be a real chore.

Post a reply to this message