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submitted 1 day ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world

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[-] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 46 points 1 day ago

Especially these days. Current-gen x86 architecture has all kinds of insane optimizations and special instruction sets that the Pentium I never had (e.g. SSE). You really do need a higher-level compiler at your back to make the most of it these days. And even then, there are cases where you have to resort to inline ASM or processor-specific intrinsics to optimize to the level that Roller Coaster Tycoon is/was. (original system specs)

[-] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 19 hours ago

I might be wrong, but doesn't SSE require you to explicitly use it in C/C++? Laying out your data as arrays and specifically calling the SIMD operations on them?

[-] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 4 points 19 hours ago

There’s absolutely nothing you can do in C that you can’t also do in assembly. Because assembly is just the bunch of bits that the compiler generates.

That said, you’d have to be insane to write a game featuring SIMD instructions these days in assembly.

[-] Wilzax@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago

Technically assembly is a human-readable, paper-thin abstraction of the machine code. It really only implements one additional feature over raw machine code and that's labels, which prevents you from having to rewrite jump and goto instructions EVERY TIME you refactor upstream code to have a different number of instructions.

So not strictly the bunch of bits. But very close to it.