Doing point lights in one of my shaders recently. Someone with more experience then i suggested i use distance as opposed to dot for the attenuation calculations
so i wrote
attenFactors.z = dot(lightPos, lightPos);
attenFactors.y = sqrt(attenFactors.z);
this person suggested i rewrite it to
attenFactors.y = distance(lightPos);
attenFactors.z = attenFactors.y * attenFactors.y;
to me they are equivalent operations so i thought that mine would be slightly faster since im removing a multiplication. however we are talking 1 operation right?. so does it really matter?
HLSL distance vs dot
Functionally those are exactly the same. Dotting a vector with itself is equal summing the squares of its components, which is exactly what distance() will do. I would guess that once the code is optimized you'd also end up running the exact same instructions, at least on a modern GPU that uses scalar operations per-thread. Code like that usually comes from people writing for older GPU's where it might actually issue a dedicated dot product instruction.
Author
i figured dot might be hardware accelerated, but what your saying is making me ask.... distance doesn't do a square root?
The hardware may or may not have a native dot product instruction, it would depend on the GPU. The internal ISA actually changes pretty frequently among different chipset versions, and like I mentioned before the latest architectures from both Nvidia and AMD both only use scalar instructions.
distance() does compute the square root of the sum, I just left that part out for brevity.
distance() does compute the square root of the sum, I just left that part out for brevity.
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