I think GCC on linux will compile Altivec code - although it might require you do add some libs to your Linux install. The __VEC__ define should be recognized by GCC otherwise just do -D__VEC__ to get that. I'm not writing any Altivec code that is OSX specific that I'm aware of at the moment. That being said, I also have no intention of ever checking the code on PPC Linux either - frankly I no longer see the point of PPC Linux, especially for audio and video.

One thing to realize is that many of the performance enhancements of GEM on OSX are related to Apple's tweaks to QT and GL and you will not get these on Linux. I would expect a significant performance disparity between the two OSes as Linux loses the Altivec decompression routines from QT, direct DMA texture uploads, non-power-of-two textures and the general vector routines like memcpy and bzero that use Altivec and PPC ASM. I can't really say what the state of video drivers on PPC Linux is right now, but I'm pretty sure that Nvidia doesn't offer binaries for their chips and ATI support is a question mark as to what features are offered (although 3D acceleration is there).

cgc

Quoting "B. Bogart" ben@ekran.org:

Hey all,

I just had the idea that it would be nice if linux/Gem for PPC used the same altivec acceleration as the OSX version.

How hard would it be to put this in the build system?

Just thinking out loud...

Ben

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