MMX, SSE, 3DNOW!

[AlextheFirst]

Well, is Celestia using this instructions?
If not, thren why not?

CU

[Thilo]

judging from this question it seems that you dont even have a clue what all these things are ;)

[selden]

To answer the question, though, yes.

Also, the OpenGL libraries provided by the graphic card vendors are (usually) highly optimized for the different CPU instruction sets.

[AlextheFirst]

I now about OpenGL
I`m just wondering about orbits calculations etc.

[chris]

I'm not using SSE, SSE2, or 3DNow instructions in Celestia (except indirectly through the OpenGL driver.) There are couple places I can think of where SSE or 3DNow would be useful, but there are more pressing things to be done than write optimizations that will only work on a single platform

--Chris

[Sum0]

Well, 3DNow! and MMX and all that are really just gimmicks to get people to think it's worth paying extra for a particualar processor, and aren't that useful really. That's what i've always been told...

[chris]

Well, 3DNow! and MMX and all that are really just gimmicks to get people to think it's worth paying extra for a particualar processor, and aren't that useful really. That's what i've always been told...

Not sure how useful MMX is now, but 3DNow and SSE are very useful for a certain class of applications. They don't help your office suite or web rbowser run faster, but image and signal processing, 3D graphics, and simulation apps can benefit from these instructions.

--Chris

[Raul.]

When you are using a HUGE stars database SSE/3DNow can really make the difference. I think it would be pretty useful to simulate the asteroid belt too. Every clock cycle counts when you're dealing with thousands of objects.