Re: [AD] SSE2 vs malloc()

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On Saturday 15 October 2005 02:28 am, aj wrote:
> You would not be doing SSE2 instructions on video bitmaps, it makes no
> sense to do so.

Depends on what you're doing. As I understand it, for properly implemented 
systems, when you lock a bitmap the system gives you a pointer to the VRAM 
data to do with what you need (write to it, read from it, whichever). You 
can't gaurantee the alignment of that pointer.

Also, it's worth pointing out, that bitmaps are aligned per pixel. Since SSE2 
uses 16-byte alignment, that means someone grabbing pixel 2 through 15 of an 
8-bit bitmap is grabbing unaligned data.

Part of me thinks the compiler is smart enough to not handle pointer variables 
using SSE2 for this very reason.. because it can't know if it's aligned or 
not. Instead, it would do this for global or local variables where it can 
predetermine the memory address, and it will know where it's aligned and safe 
to use SSE2 instructions on.




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