Compilers!
Please optimize my code
Compilers are known to be pretty good these days and they do a terrific job. It's still a good idea to look after them for performance sensitive stuff, you know, just in case.
There is a simple piece of code that is used in quite a few places, but just recently it was in a hot path in a compressed texture decoding routine. . . .
Snitch
A block compression tool
What
There are plenty of existing compression file formats with very nice tools and performance. You don't just go out and create a new one for no reason, right? I am a graphics programmer at heart and do all kinds of stuff where I load assets, like, a lot and want to bundle them into a resource file of some kind. In the past we . . .
JPEG Decoding Benchmark
Safe for work edition
What's this bullshit? A picture of bananas!? They aren't even RIPE!!! You didn't sign up for this crap when you clicked on the article did you? Stay calm; everything shall be explained shortly.
Background story
We must go back in time by about 10 years to the beginning of the story. It was a fine autumn . . .
Software Rasterizer
Testing a vector math library with fun hobby project
It is a completely different to think that the code you are writing is not generating bad code and it not actually generating bad code. You want to be sure so you have to give the code real data to transform. I am not one of those people with great imaginations so I decided that I will write a software triangle rasterizer.
Having . . .
Compilers and SIMD
The love story
Compilers are pretty cool these days; they can auto-vectorize your scalar code! All you need to do is write code in such a way that the compiler can show you who's the boss.
Here's a simple example:
struct float32x16
{
float v[16];
};
float32x16 compute(float32x16 a, float32x16 b)
{
. . .SIMD Scalar Accessor
How to make the type system work for you.
One day you find yourself writing code for a C++ vector math library. Of course, it is written with templates so that you can parametrize the scalar type and vector dimensions. You will have something like this:
template <typename ScalarType, int Size>
struct Vector
{
ScalarType data[Size];
};
It can't . . .
