Possible 64-bit or Dual/Quad core Windows support?

[Jay]

Would this be hard to implement? I'm seeing on my dual core system
it's only using 50% of the CPU. This is a great app and would benefit
hugely from multi-cpu support.

Cheers,
Jay

[f.mo...@freenet.de]

Hi Jay,

Yes, gravit is great, i was always trying to find some time to build
such a program myself :)

I am actually playing around with the sources now, to get some more
speed out of it.

my current results:

* Compiling with gcc4 helps (processors optimization, sse math etc),
* i also found a few speedups for square/square root/invese square
root computation that helps on some CPUs
(see or http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/sqroot.html)

Of course gravit could benefit from multi-threaded, parallel
computation.
I tried to get the multi-thread support to work with SDL Threads, and
i have a gravit now that can do "applying forces" with on CPU cores in
parralel.
Bad news is: "computing tree" takes much longer, and i dont see a
simple way to do that in parallel threads.
I think we need the original author of gravit to really get more
benetit from multi-core CPUs here....


I will post my patches later (need to find time for some cleanup
first...)

best wishes,
keep on hacking,

Frank.

[f.mo...@freenet.de]

opps, forgot the URLs for fast square root calculations:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fast-inverse-square-root/

http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/sqroot.html

http://www.mceniry.net/papers/Fast%20Inverse%20Square%20Root.pdf (you
can skip the math part, look for the author's recommended code in the
summary)