Using Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions for 3D Geometry Processing

Three dimensional (3D) graphics applications is an important workload running on today’s computer system. A cost-effective graphics solution is to use a general processor for 3D geometry processing and a specialized hardware for rasterization. 3D geometry processing is an inherently parallel task. Therefore, many CPU vendors add SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instruction extensions to accelerate 3D geometry processing. In this paper, we evaluate the performance 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 layout of vertices in memory is important for the effectiveness of SIMD-FP. We also study the effect 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.