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[Evadman]

Do any distributed computing programs take advantage of SSE code? Seti? RC5?

and as a side note, is it common to use SSE in games?

Reason I'm asking is b/c I upgraded my Athlon-C 1.33ghz (i cracked it when changing heatsink) to Athlong XP 1600+. But in order for SSE to be detected I need to reinstall WIn2k which I'm in no mood to do. So I'm curious if I'm losing potential performance by not having SSE. Thanks

I would assume that SETI has SSE optimizations, but I am not 100% sure. Who here knows what DC project would be the best bang for his CPU buck?

 

[nagger]

You'll need to re-install the OS not only for the SSE instructions, but for the Hardware prefetch thingy.

Has for SSE use I don't know any game or DC project that uses those instructions.

 

[vss1980]

Yes it is fairly standard now for SSE to be used in just more than games. As far as I know, SETI doesn't use SSE. There are a few reasons for this, such as if they did it would limit the effectiveness of older PC's (remember, there will always be more lower-spec pc's in the world than pc's that are considered modern).

Examples of programs where SSE makes a difference can be found just by looking at processor review articles such as this P3 article. Note the clear difference between the P2-450 and the P3-500, definitely more than 50MHz of CPU power difference there (and both processors use same bus speed and cache architecture). Also, think DivX encoding and decoding to AutoCad and they will all have a little something in there to make use of it.

Most games which use SSE in their internal code (ie. nothing to do with DirectX) may have the same problems as others accessing it on your system, however I am not sure what would happen with DirectX if you were to re-install the latest graphics drivers (sometimes they detect the CPU caps) and directx version (as this makes lots of use of MMX/SSE) as to if that would pick up on SSE being there even in Win2K doesn't.