As I understand it, the Pentium MMX stuff is integer-based---but it may be
useful towards the tail-end of the rendering pipeline.  (I gather that
3D games like to use MMX, but they may have to do all of their math in
fixed-point arithmetic, for all I know.)

On the other hand AMD's ``3D Now'' provides hardware support for 3D
floating point operations (presumably matrix-multiplies are big features).

Does anyone know if there is any intention to support (or if there is any
existing support) for either of these technologies in Mesa or GLX?  Or are
they essentially redundant of, and inferior to, hardware in many of these
newer video cards?

I wouldn't think that so much effort would be put into the CPU's if the
trend was towards having the features in the graphics cards.  But, I don't
know even what MMX & 3D-Now really do, much less how they interact with
the capabilities of many video cards.


Does anyone have some insight to share on this topic?  It's been bouncing
around the back of my skull for a while, and it seems that the number of
people with MMX and/or 3D-Now support should be large enough that someone
would be looking at it, if there were merit to doing so.


Thanks in advance.  (^&


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  --rkr@rkr.kcnet.com