keybored.me | Display

niconiconi

1 year ago • •

niconiconi
1 year ago • •

#TIL Linus Torvalds had a Linux Quake3 port on DEC Alpha.

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at transmeta dot com>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 15:50:28 -0700 (PDT)

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 dewar@gnat.com wrote:
>
> Well it sure would be nice to here from some of these mythical numerical programmers (I don't care if they are writing games or nuclear reactor codes) who would be happier, so far we haven't heard this! And in my experience, even quite inexperienced floating-point numerical programmers are very disturbed when optimization changes the results of their programs.

I used -ffast-math myself, when I worked on the quake3 port to Linux (it's been five years, how time flies).

It didn't make much difference at that point, because the x86 had hand-written assembly, and gcc for the alpha didn't do much (anything?) with -ffast-math.

But I tried _everything_. The main FP work I did on that thing on the alpha improved the framerate by about 50% on alpha - FP was _that_ critical for it. Most of it was by looking at gcc output and trying to re-organize the C code to make it be better (because gcc didn't do much on its own).

#til

Lo, thar be cookies on this site to keep track of your login. By clicking 'okay', you are CONSENTING to this.

⇧