A realtime Mandelbrot zoomer in SSE assembly and CUDA

Back in 2002, Thanassis Tsiodras decided to begin investigating the power of SSE on the new Athlon CPU’s and wrote a rather complex real-time Mandlebrot zoomer program.  Now, 7 years later, he revisits his code and rewrites using NVidia’s CUDA to startling effect:

In less than one hour, I went from my rather complex SSE inline assembly, to a simple, clear Mandelbrot implementation… that run… 15 times faster!

Let me say this again: 1500% faster. Jaw dropping. Or put a different way: I went from 147fps at 320×240… to 210fps… at 1024×768!

via A realtime Mandelbrot zoomer in SSE assembly and CUDA.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .