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 computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.