Re: Larkin, Power BASIC cannot be THAT good:

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:58:36 +0300) it happened Anssi Saari
<as@xxxxxx> wrote in <vg3ljnzj4pv.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Jan Panteltje <pNaonStpealmtje@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

How fast do you have to go anyways?
The latest H264 encoders use Nvidia graphics cards as hardware accelerator.
that is so specialised, if you design that sort of soft, then yes, maybe
you need to be wizard in x86 asm:
http://www.mediacoderhq.com/
Do they use asm? perhaps?

I don't know about them, but to my knowledge ffmpeg and mplayer use a
lot of asm.

Yes, those do.
And I use ffmpeg mplayer :-)
Those are just building blocks.
I use libmpeg3 too....


As far as I know, there isn't much of automatic vectorization in C
compilers either, so any non-trivial use of SSE and such needs hand
coded assembly.


OTOH, I think there was a fairly recent "survey" on slashdot about
assembly. The result was that few slashdot readers use it, but then I
read it as "slashdot reading perl and php coders don't use assembly".
Kind of no brainer...

Well, it makes your code non-portable for a start.
And, how much is the real gain in speed? With ever more powerful processors
and 30 fps or 25 fps TV systems it may no longer matter, except for encoding.
And for encoding H264 is the bottle neck ATM, and for that they now
start using the Nvidia API.

It can be fun programming in asm to get max speed, I have done video on a PIC
in asm for example, but if you have enough processing power why bother?
.