What Is Swizzling?

Swizzling is the way to go if you want your pixels to look good and render fast. It is because it uses the way that a specific GPU or CPU reads the pixel information, thereby lessening the overhead. The result? A swizzled image that can be rendered much more quickly. You might not know it, but those pixels you're looking at are swizzling. When a computer is trying to generate a picture, it has to translate the vector information (the computer code) and translate it into something that looks like what's on your screen. Each graphics processing unit has its way of reading pixel information. So, if you use one GPU to create an image and then try using the same image on another GPU or even on the same version itself, you might find that there are differences in how it renders. That's where swizzling comes in: If you reorder the vector information in a specific way, you can make sure that your graphics processor reads each pixel from left to right and top to bottom. Is this reordering called "swizzling." once you, do it? You've got yourself a new image ready for rendering! Vector swizzling is a technique that allows programmers to change the order of a vector's components in memory. In other words, it's a simple way to reorder the data and make it easier for graphics processors to process. It is done by creating a new vector and assigning its components from the original vector to look like this: c1.rgba = abgr, c2.abgr = rgba, etc. If you're rendering with an older graphics processor (GPU), you can use special instructions that will work faster than moving all the data around manually. If you generate with a newer GPU, you'll have extra space in your texture cache! But why do we even need this? It all comes down to how GPUs access data differently than processors do. For example, when using OpenGL (which is what most games use), GPUs load data into registers sequentially, while CPUs load data randomly into registers.