OpenMP was easy to use in Visual Studio, to parallelize obvious data-parallel sections of the code without changing the code too much, and without spending lots

OpenMP was easy to use in Visual Studio, to parallelize obvious data-parallel sections of the code without changing the code too much, and without spending lots of time learning OpenMP itself. For things like texture encoding, filtering, processing it was the right fit and much better than rolling yet another worker version. Also DEBUG versions had it disabled. Another plus was easier control from the environment.