GCC does a fairly nice job of producing code for vector types when the
hardware doesn't support SIMD, but it seems to break certain math
optimization rules due to excess precision (?). Still, it works well
enough for the core engine, but may not be well suited to the tools.
However, so far, only qfvis uses vector types (and it's not tested yet),
and tools should probably be used on suitable machines anyway (not
forces, of course).
Care needs to be taken to ensure the right function is used with the
right arguments, but with these, the need to use qconj(d|f) for a
one-off inverse rotation is removed.
They take advantage of gcc's vector_size attribute and so only cross,
dot, qmul, qvmul and qrot (create rotation quaternion from two vectors)
are needed at this stage as basic (per-component) math is supported
natively by gcc.
The provided functions work on horizontal (array-of-structs) data, ie a
vec4d_t or vec4f_t represents a single vector, or traditional vector
layout. Vertical layout (struct-of-arrays) does not need any special
functions as the regular math can be used to operate on four vectors at
a time.
Functions are provided for loading a vec4 from a vec3 (4th element set
to 0) and storing a vec4 into a vec3 (discarding the 4th element).
With this, QF will require AVX2 support (needed for vec4d_t). Without
support for doubles, SSE is possible, but may not be worthwhile for
horizontal data.
Fused-multiply-add is NOT used because it alters the results between
unoptimized and optimized code, resulting in -mfma really meaning
-mfast-math-anyway. I really do not want to have to debug issues that
occur only in optimized code.
Bill Currie