your computer must be seriously bad if it performs better with B3D than with BM as BM uses optimations not available to B3D at all (especially in MingW 5.1.X in BM 1.26+)
It's a year-ish old Dell so that's exactly what the market is like right now.
still: not using sqr and staying on squared distance is a several magnitudes faster.
Can you explain that in a little more detail? I didn't really follow that bit of your first post to be honest. It's very early/late. EDIT: AH! IT JUST CLICKED!
Unless you are doing hundreds of square roots per frame it is not going to matter.
That's very true, but I assume he (ringwraith) is and it does.