d3dx9: Avoid expensive computations

Matteo Bruni matteo.mystral at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 08:33:39 CST 2013


2013/2/26 Rico Schüller <kgbricola at web.de>:
> Hi Nozomi,
>
> this is pretty fast. Just some numbers (run time on my machine, so it might
> not be that representative)...
>
> before: 43s
> previous patch: 27s
> this patch: 21s
> native: 16s
>
> So from the speed point of view, it's a lot closer than the rest.
>
> Though, I would split this into 2 patches, one for D3DXMatrixDeterminant and
> one for D3DXMatrixInverse.

That's probably a good idea.

> I think it's a nice step forward. Thought we
> might test the speed of an sse version and may use it later ...
>
> Are there any other opinions?
>

My main concern is that the effort in optimizing further those two
functions might not have significant effects on actual application
execution times (think diminishing returns). I'm not against making
the code faster, especially if that doesn't make the code unreadable,
but it might not be the best place to work on if you want to optimize
d3dx9. You might want to profile some applications and see what the
actual bottlenecks are.

Specifically on these functions, an SSE-based version will probably
run significantly faster, but you need to solve the issues with
compatibility with older CPUs e.g. by selecting the correct function
implementation at runtime in some fashion, as Henri mentioned. BTW
there might be other potential problems, such as applications setting
the SSE control register in some unexpected way (although that happens
with the FPU control word too).
You can also give a shot to GCC optimization options, such as
"-mfpmath=sse" (and a suitable -march value). Obviously we don't want
to use them in general but it might be interesting to see what GCC can
do there. Keep in mind that the compiler has to stay on the safe side
when optimizing and you might need to add attributes around to allow
more aggressive optimizations. From a quick Google search I found
http://locklessinc.com/articles/vectorize/ which seems to show the
general idea.


Cheers,
Matteo.

> Cheers
> Rico
>
>
>
> On 25.02.2013 12:34, Nozomi Kodama wrote:
>>
>> Rico,
>>
>> can you give a try to this patch?
>> If it is slightly slower than native, we could at first merge it.
>>
>>
>> Anyway, if the application is well coded, this function should not be
>> called often. Usually an application uses transformations matrices that
>> are a lot easier to inverse
>>
>> Nozomi
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *De :* Henri Verbeet <hverbeet at gmail.com>
>> *À :* Rico Schüller <kgbricola at web.de>
>> *Cc :* wine-devel at winehq.org; Nozomi Kodama <nozomi.kodama at yahoo.com>
>> *Envoyé le :* Lundi 25 février 2013 0h08
>> *Objet :* Re: d3dx9: Avoid expensive computations
>>
>>
>> On 25 February 2013 10:24, Rico Schüller <kgbricola at web.de
>> <mailto:kgbricola at web.de>> wrote:
>>  > I did some small tests for speed with the following results. You may
>> also
>>  > avoid such a lot of variable assignments like *pout = out and you may
>> use 4
>>  > vecs instead. This should save ~48 assignments and it should also
>> improve
>>  > the speed a bit more (~10%). Though, native is still 40% faster than
>> that.
>>  >
>> I'd somewhat expect native to use SSE versions of this kind of thing
>> when the CPU supports those instructions. You also generally want to
>> pay attention to the order in which you access memory, although
>> perhaps it doesn't matter so much here because an entire matrix should
>> be able to fit in a single cacheline, provided it's properly aligned.
>>
>>
>
>
>



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