> Well, that's nice of you two to go looking for outside help without > even > checking with the person who has written most of the graphics code. > BTW, > Francois hit the nail on the head. First we worry about getting > stuff > working and checking our current performance. After that, we can > consider > using non-portable optimizations where needed. It bothers me that simply asking for information has generated this kind of response. I don't recall getting this reaction when I asked around what is involved in hardware-accelerated OpenGL. To quote from the Book of Phipps, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." :D I did Google around for some info on them, but what I found was an explanation of what the instructions were, which is not what I needed. What I personally am looking for is *basic* information about this kind of thing. What are these instructions used for? Why are they so supposedly cool? How is using them better than just using the regular instruction set cooked up by Intel? Why does it seem that they are most often associated with graphics? Can't they be used with other things, too? That kind of thing. With my being self-taught, there are a great many things in computer science that I just don't know about. I only know *this* much about assembler, for example, and I was not aware that Gabe -- or anyone else, for that matter, -- has or had any experience/ expertise with this, and so I asked. In any event, I would like to say that I don't want this to turn ugly. :) --DarkWyrm