[ODE] Some SSE in Quick step

[Jon Watte]

> Yep. You are reading it correct. From my understanding (and I don't
> know 
> what I am talking about here) is that SSE is mostly marketing crap and 
> "can" be a lot faster in "some" cases, but generally it takes a whole 
> lot of work to get any gains.


This depends a lot on architecture, too. The Pentium III and Pentium IV 
have special execution units for SSE, and their x87 FP implementation is 
somewhat dorky in places, so you can get nice gains (we have a SSE 
skinned character system that benefits from it).

Meanwhile, on Athlons, they have a really good x87 implementation, and 
they also seem to use the same execution units for their implementaiton 
of SSE, so the SSE code is unlikely to run much faster than the x87 code 
for the same process. However, you can still get benefits from the 
explicit memory and cache management (the first "S" in SSE).

Cheers,

			/ h+