Florian Ludwig wrote:
but I have no idea how much performance gain you'd really get.
On a dual core processor (and those are now all around) I guess its would benefit a lot of this since both cores are used and not just one. (Or if you have access to a 4-cpu @3.2 ghz server you would render an image with lots of blur in very little time :)
Obviously :) But that is only true for the parallelizable parts, and you're also adding a bit of overhead (although I expect it won't be too much). And then there is always the problem of limited memory bandwidth of course.
So the speedup will definitely be less than 2, the only question that remains is how much less. If it's 1.5, well, that may be worth it. If it's just 1.0001 or something like that (or even less than one) it would be dubious.
BTW, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law if you're interested in this sort of thing.