Kaetemi

SSE2 provides functionality for performing faster on aligned memory. By copying the first and last bytes of an unaligned memory destination using the conventional unaligned functionality, and copying everything in between as aligned, it is possible to make use of this performance improvement on large unaligned memory blocks as well.

In this graph the green lines are the conventional memcpy available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, the red lines are the SSE memcpy function available in Nevrax NeL, and the blue lines are the custom SSE2 function. The bright colored lines are the performance on alinged memory blocks, while the dark colored lines are tested on differently unaligned blocks of memory. Horizontally the copy function is tested on different sizes of memory, on the vertical axis the copy speed is displayed in MB/s.

As you can see, NeL's SSE memcpy performs very well on aligned memory, but gives horrible performance on unaligned memory, as it does not take the aligning of the memory blocks into account. The builtin memcpy function is fastest of all at copying blocks below 128 bytes, but also reaches it's speed limit there. The SSE2 memcpy takes larger sizes to get to it's maximum performance, but peaks above NeL's aligned SSE memcpy even for unaligned memory blocks.

Code is available below, ask before using.

Back from the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2009 in Cairo. Our team, Runtime Error, reached the top 6 of the Game Development category with Balanced. We had lots of people coming to our booth there, and they all liked our game. Some people found it a bit too complex, though, I'll have to blame the Xbox 360 Gamepad for that. Here's a set of pictures for you!

Currently working on this here with a small team.

As you might have noticed, I haven't posted any follow ups on my first blog post on Snowballs yet. I had some ideas planned to talk about, but there's been other work like the NeLSound engine that had higher priority. Since Snowballs doesn't have sound yet, you can see this as work on Snowballs as well, if you wish so. I have also been working on getting the content pipeline up and running. About half of the old broken script mess have been converted to python scripts right now, so it's possible here to pull a whole new landscape trough the content pipeline. There's some stuff outside NeL that I'm working on, as well, which takes up quite a bit of time as well. But more importantly, there's this game I'm *cough*secretly*cough* working on, which I'm using NeL for. This has been producing some pretty nice code that might sometime be modified for use in Snowballs. It's got some useful stuff in there like a login screen that uses CEGUI, with a bunch of changes to the login server to get some more information on the shards in the window.