Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   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.


On my AMD64 Linux machine, POV-Ray 3.6 runs the benchmark in ~1770 seconds,
being a generic i686 binary. MegaPOV 1.2.1 AMD64 binary does the same stunt in
~1423 seconds. I expect this to be mainly due to SSE2.

No special SSE2 "optimization hints" have been coded into MegaPOV. It's just
plain POV 3.6 code with some functionality added. And compiled with different
options. (Both were compiled using g++)

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