Q...1? 2017 progress report

Created: 17 May 2017
Written by bositman


[Enhancement] GSdx: Removal of SSSE3 and AVX configurations

The use of instruction sets available on newer CPUs can significantly boost performance at the cost of compatibility with older CPUs.
For this reason, 5 different builds of GSdx (SSE2, SSSE3, SSE4.1, AVX, AVX2) were provided to maximize performance on newer CPUs, yet retain compatibility with older CPUs.
This, however, confused new users, who didn't know what version of the plugin they should select.

The software renderer JIT was recently updated so that, except for the AVX2 build, it will detect and generate code using instruction sets up to AVX at runtime,
depending on what the CPU supports. This change provided an opportunity to reduce the number of GSdx builds. Since the hardware renderer performance
of the SSSE3 and AVX builds were no better than the SSE2 and SSE4.1 builds respectively, the decision was made to drop the SSSE3 and AVX builds.

This leaves us with 3 remaining GSdx builds:

SSE2 - compatible with almost all CPUs.
SSE4.1 - compatible with most CPUs (requires Intel Penryn / AMD Bulldozer or newer). Faster hardware renderer performance.
AVX2 - least compatible (requires Intel Haswell / AMD Ryzen or newer). Fastest hardware and software renderer performance.

https://pcsx2.net/283-q1-2017-progress-report.html