Using Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions for 3D Geometry Processing

Three dimensional (3D)graphics applications is an impor- tant workload running on today ’s computer system.A cost-e ffective graphics solution is to use a general processor for 3D geometry pro- cessing and a specialized hardware for rasterization.3D geometry pro- cessing is an inherently parallel task.Therefore,many CPU vendors add SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data)instruction extensions to ac- celerate 3D geometry processing.In this paper,we evaluate the perfor- mance impact of using the Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE)for 3D geometry processing.We use SIMD-FP to improve the computational throughput by processing four vertices in parallel.We find that the lay- out of vertices in memory is important for the e ffectiveness of SIMD-FP. We also study the e ffect of using prefetch instructions to improve the memory performance.The experimental results show that using Intel SSE can achieve close to 4x speedup for geometry processing