Vadim Plessky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
[...]
> | It only works noticeably for very specific things, and the only one I am
> | aware of is MPEG uncompression. Fortunately kde supports MMX for its mpeg
> | routines for example.
> |
> It should work also for image manipulations and audio
> compression/decompression/mixing/editing.
For audio, decompression is quick enough on modern computers to not care
about any more opti (1-3% of the cpu for mp3 uncompres). Compression is
well-known to be optimized by algorithms better than brute cpu force:
compare l3enc to xing's "tompg".
For image manipulation, I don't know enough to discuss.
> In PC/Windows world, Adobe Photoshop uses MMX heavily.
> Also, DirectX supports MMX (and 3DNow!)
Yeah, passing from DirectX6 (no 3dnow) to DirectX7 (3dnow) on my k6-2/333
with i740 last year was speeding up things of 1-10%, on 3d benchmarks.
I don't consider it as being enough to be important. You know, when your
game offers 15 fps, you can care to have 16 or 17. It doesn't change
things.
As 3dnow is vastly optimized for 3d stuff, I doubt it could be different
for other apps.
> | Mesa, if used in software, will never be quick enough to be useable, due
> | to its general-purpose design. At least things like "gears" will have
> | framerate, but chromium or quake3, never.
>
> I have ATI Mach 64 (Rage Mobility in notebook)
> For some reason, 3D acceleration in it is not supported by XFree.
> I really wonder how Linux can achieve significant market share if such
> standard hardware/feature is not supported. (ATI is the leader in 3D chips
> sales)
That is ATI's problems. If they are leader on the market, they can afford
to ignore Linux, unfortunately. If we examine the audio market, Creative
Labs could afford to ignore the community until a recent date, because
they were leader. I remember to have read in the kernel source for audio
subsystem that Hannu Savolainen received this answer from Creative when he
asked for free hardware and specs: "you can buy the devel kit".
One can't purely rely on the free software community to produce high
quality hardware optimized drivers for any hardware videocard. We need
support from the vendors.
> | Used with hardware acceleration, 3dnow/mmx is nearly nothing because it
> | competes with the hw accel which is ofcourse much quicker.
>
> What about triangle processing in rendering pipeline? (first stage of
> rendering process)?
Of course. The instructions can be used for that. The problem is that, it
is less optimized than rendering could be with these instructions, and,
more important, it is only a minor part of the cost of the game engines.
Today's game engines have to deal with 3d morphing, local lighting, etc,
and more important, IA and other computations..
> I know, for example, NVidia uses 3DNow instruction set in its reference
> driver (of course, for AMD processors). Asus driver for NVidia has
> optimizations for 3DNow.
> So, do not underestimate 3DNow, please...
I do not. But it will not gain more than 10% in any case. Or show me that
I am wrong! And for end-user, what is the point in having a gain of less
than even 20%? It's not "feelable".
--
Guillaume Cottenceau -- Distribution Developer for MandrakeSoft
http://us.mandrakesoft.com/~gc/
