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Glynor: Recommended FFDShow Version?

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glynor:
Yeah.... My taskbar looks like that when it's building thumbs too (and MC12 crashes a bit too).  MC11.1 has no problems with the same FFDSHOW version though, so I'm suspicious that it's just bad at the thumbnailing routine.


--- Quote from: Mr ChriZ on July 06, 2006, 03:55:52 pm ---Erm... what is an SSE capable processor?

--- End quote ---

SSE is a SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) extension to the x86 architecture used in most modern Intel and AMD processors.  This "extension" was designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 with their Pentium 3 processor as a response to AMD's 3dNOW extension.  It is sort-of an updated MMX (if you remember that from the later original Pentium days).  SMID extensions allow the processor to more quickly perform repetitive tasks in parallel on large sets of similarly formatted data, such as adding an integer to each of the fields in a database of numbers.  Wikipedia gives a good example:


--- Quote ---One example would be changing the brightness of an image. Each pixel of an image consists of three values for the brightness of the red, green and blue portions of the color. To change the brightness, the R G and B values are read from memory, a value is added (or subtracted) from it, and the resulting value is written back out to memory.

With a SIMD processor there are two improvements to this process. For one the data is understood to be in blocks, and a number of values can be loaded all at once. Instead of a series of instructions saying "get this pixel, now get this pixel", a SIMD processor will have a single instruction that effectively says "get all of these pixels" ("all" is a number that varies from design to design). For a variety of reasons, this can take much less time than it would to load each one by one as in a traditional CPU design.
--- End quote ---

There's some other stuff too, but it's all pretty technical.  Suffice to say it speeds up certain operations on the processor, but only if the software has been optimized to use it properly.  Many of the operations it speeds are important in multimedia applications (such as in the above example) because they often use large data sets.


--- Quote from: Mr ChriZ on July 06, 2006, 03:55:52 pm ---How do I know if I've got one?!
I've got an Athlon XP 1700.

--- End quote ---

This is a much easier question to answer.  Simply download the free CPU-Z utility.  When you run it (it takes no install, just unzip it to some folder on your hard drive), it will report all kinds of cool info about your system, including any processor extensions yours might support...



I'm pretty sure all Athlon XPs supported SSE (in addition to AMD's 3DNow extension) though.  It can't hurt to check.  The Athlon XP will not support SSE2 though so don't get any of those builds.

glynor:
Yeah... I just checked.  The first Athlon XP processor (Palomino core - 1500+) supported SSE, so yours is certainly fine.  That was one of the big differences between the Athlon XP processors and the "vanilla" Athlons.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K7/TYPE-Athlon%20XP.html

I'd still get CPU-Z though, it's pretty cool and quite useful.

Mr ChriZ:
Just tried it and sure enough SSE!
Quite interesting cheers =0)

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