clipka <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Actually, from what I gather from the "Intel? 64 and IA-32 Architectures
> Software Developer?s Manual", all the fancy stuff from MMX through SSE, SSE2,
> SSE3, SSSE3 to SSE4 is rather primitive compared to what the x87 FPU can do -
> except when it comes to bulk add, subtract, multiply or divide. Which is what
> they're designed for: Vectors and matrices. That's why they're called Streaming
> SIMD (= Single Instruction Multiple Data) Extensions.

  Since POV-Ray performs a lot of matrix multiplications (as well as
vector x matrix multiplications) it could theoretically benefit from SSE
optimizations. Of course it's quite difficult to say in (portable) C++
"calculate this matrix multiplication in the most optimal way using SSE".

  OTOH, I wonder how much that would really speed it up, because AFAIK
POV-Ray spends most of its time calculating ray-boundingbox and ray-surface
intersections rather than multiplying vectors and matrices.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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