Kaetemi

SSE2 provides functionality for performing faster on aligned memory. By copying the first and last bytes of an unaligned memory destination using the conventional unaligned functionality, and copying everything in between as aligned, it is possible to make use of this performance improvement on large unaligned memory blocks as well.

In this graph the green lines are the conventional memcpy available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, the red lines are the SSE memcpy function available in Nevrax NeL, and the blue lines are the custom SSE2 function. The bright colored lines are the performance on alinged memory blocks, while the dark colored lines are tested on differently unaligned blocks of memory. Horizontally the copy function is tested on different sizes of memory, on the vertical axis the copy speed is displayed in MB/s.

As you can see, NeL's SSE memcpy performs very well on aligned memory, but gives horrible performance on unaligned memory, as it does not take the aligning of the memory blocks into account. The builtin memcpy function is fastest of all at copying blocks below 128 bytes, but also reaches it's speed limit there. The SSE2 memcpy takes larger sizes to get to it's maximum performance, but peaks above NeL's aligned SSE memcpy even for unaligned memory blocks.

Code is available below, ask before using.