Try filling any modern screen buffer (>1024x768) pixel-by-pixel Sure, if you completely throw away SIMD, things might be slow. you are given just ~300 cycles/

Try filling any modern screen buffer (>1024x768) pixel-by-pixel Sure, if you completely throw away SIMD, things might be slow. you are given just ~300 cycles/pixel, which is gone quickly after slow memory accesses Memory accesses are pipelined and are generally not slow; an L1 cache access is 3 cycles and prefetching on modern CPUs is generally flawless for such situations. multi-cycle instructions. Since when do you need multiplies to fill a screen with a solid color? Even if you had to do YUV -> RGB conversion, that is done much faster with a multi-dimensional LUT than with multiplies (see swscale). Of course it's even faster in SIMD. It's quite possible to do very fast rasterization on modern hardware without a GPU. It's just that people generally don't do it, because everyone has GPUs to do it for them.