Achieving full-motion video on the Nintendo 64 (2000) [pdf]

Vector registers are 8 lanes, signed 16-bit, so they map quite well to per-pixel calculations on each plane (YUV), which is what video codecs do, as you can process 8 pixels at a time, and you have 16-bit precision to handle intermediate results.

The most complex hurdle is that RSP only has 4K of RAM so you need to DMA in and out macroblocks a lot (especially since I can't possibly rewrite a FULL h264 decoder in RSP assembly, not in this lifetime: I need to write only specific performance-sensitive algorithms, while the bulk of the decoder stays in C; this means that the same data ends up going in & out the RSP a lot, especially since the H264 decoder I'm using is not aware of this problem).

This said, RSP DMA is even rectangle based, so it's another perfect fit: I can DMA a macroblock by specifying the pointer in RAM, width and height (usually 16x16, but some algos works on sub-partitions of 8x8 or 4x4) and the stride (screen width), so that a single DMA call will transfer the block from the middle a frame, skipping the rest of the data.

Vector multiplications in RSP were designed to write DSP-like filters, so they map quite well to the pixel filters required by H264. There are several different multiplication instructions for different fixed point precisions, and there's even one that automatically adds 0.5 (in the correct fixed point precision) which is also a common pattern in FIR filters, and also used in H264.

Saturation (VCH/VGE/VLT opcodes) is also supported; this is useful as most algorithms eventually need to saturate the calculated value in the 0-255 range, so that's another thing which usually require 1 clock cycle for 8 pixels.

When working with 4x4 partitions, half of the vector lanes are ignored; when writing back to memory, you need to do a read / combine / write sequence (as you may want to write 4 pixels and keep the existing 4 pixels, but vector writes will write 8 pixels); in this case, the VMRG instruction is used, which basically allow to combine two vector registers into one, with a bitmask to specific where to get each lane frame.

For IDCT, it comes very handy that most RSP opcodes allows to do partial broadcasts of the lanes of one of the input registers; this allows to keep a 4x4 matrix into 2 consecutive registers and then play some tricks with broadcast to multiply by rows and by columns (which is required by IDCT where you need to compute A' x B x A, with A&B being 4x4 matrices, so if you expand that you will see that you need to rotate vectors a lot).

So well, it's actually a pretty good fit.

PS: in the Gamasutra article, it shows the RSP code used to do colorspace conversion (YUV->RGB). The article says that it give a big boost (and I can believe it: especially in MPEG1, CSC is like 30% of decoding time), but I brought it to basically 0% by letting the RDP do it (RDP is the GPU in N64). In fact, the RDP supports YUV textures: so in my H264 player, the RSP just does the interleaving (that is, merges the 3 separate Y, U, V planes into one) and then asks the RDP to blit a textured rectangle in the correct format. The RDP even runs in parallel to both RSP and CPU. It might be that, back in 2000, this wasn't fully documented by Nintendo, though I found several references in old Nintendo docs. I can't see otherwise why it wasn't used. Once you reverse engineer how to pass the correct constants, it works really well and brings the CSC cost to basically zero.