JC heeft info over 3DNow! optimalisatie in de TNT2 1.76 drivers. De geruchten gingen natuurlijk al langer, maar het is nu overduidelijk dat nVidia een paar 3DNow! ingrediënten door de drivers geroerd heeft:
Was talking to Temp, who originally told us all kinds of neat info on the TNT 1.76 drivers (in relation to 3DNow! optimization), yesterday. I'm in one of those slept-too-much-so-I'll-only-quote moods at the moment (it's a weekend):"OK. In the 1.76 drivers, there are two blocks of 3Dnow! instructions the first one is 2 KB long, and the second one, 3 KB long - approximately. The driver is a 928 K file. These optimizations account for a large proportion of the 40-50% performance increase observed in Quake II at low resolution (a 3DNow! optimized game) and the TNT 1.76 optimized drivers, to see that in both cases, the part of the code that is optimized for 3DNow! is less than 1 KB in size ... I think that achieving a 40-50% increase in performance by optimizing TWO LOOPS is worth it, and that this was worth mentioning ... only a very small proportion of the code has to be optimized for 3Dnow! to observe large performance increases".
Apologies, I scrambled some of the sentences, but I think the point is well made of the fact that a modification of less than a percent of the driver code is so effective in increasing performance. Congrats to whomever had a hand in doing that, by the way.
