Red_XIIII Posted September 7, 2001 Share Posted September 7, 2001 Jus if anybody dint know Q3 can use more then one Processor it dosnt give a mutch of a speed increase, i read like 30% but if you use windows 2000 and are planin on upgradin ure system for this game... maybe ud be wise to get a dual system of some sort anyway Q3 and falcon 4.0 are the only games i know of that can use more then one processor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Krayt Tion Posted September 7, 2001 Share Posted September 7, 2001 What I heard when I looked into this sometime last year was that Carmack did program Q3 to support SMP, but he was only messing around. Thus it works but it doesn't exactly blow sheep out of the water as it was not a primary concern in the engine or game's development. I only read a few people's comments on running Q3 on their SMP rig (virtually no one has an SMP system just for gaming) and I even read that some even lost a few FPS while running it in SMP mode. I assume you are considering with this thread the possibilities of running JK2 on a dual rig since it will be using a modified Q3 engine. 1- Not sure it is still possible. Haven't looked into the SMP abilities of other heavily modified Q3 engine games currently out there. I guess the SMP code should still be in there. 2- People claimed that Q3 ran smoother in SMP mode even if some people reported an FPS decrease. You might only see the benefits if you have Win2k and are running some seriously cpu-intensive programs while playing JK2 at the same time. There is talk of future games really supporting SMP so we can see some real added benefits but that appears to be a whiles off still. Try poking around at http://www.2cpu.com/ and seeing what you can dig up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Red_XIIII Posted September 7, 2001 Author Share Posted September 7, 2001 cool dint know that, i read it in an old article of Maxium PC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StormHammer Posted September 7, 2001 Share Posted September 7, 2001 As games (and other software) becomes more sophisticated, there is certainly a good argument for supporting SMP. I mean, processor prices have come right down (although that may change in the future), and even if you could squeeze another 50% speed out of the majority of new games (or other software ), it would certainly help. Perhaps we will even start to see dual-GPU graphics boards for the mainstream in the future. Do you think it is possible that we will start to see the development of processors for other elements? I mean, in a way we already have Sound processing units on our soundcards - although I think there is a lot of scope for increasing the speed, efficiency, workload and capacity of those chips, so someone will be able to use the abbreviation SPU in the future. I mean, do you think there would be any scope for having a separate AI processor, or some other element, that would not simply be useful for games - but for improving your interaction with your PC for general tasks? If there, in fact, a real need for simply increasing the speed of the main CPU - or should some of the workload be siphoned off to other processing units to improve the overall efficiency of a system? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GonkH8er Posted September 7, 2001 Share Posted September 7, 2001 ahhhhhhh back to the days of voodoo2 sli.... good times.... i was playing with a dual p3 800 with a gig of ram not long ago. pity it was a server, not a gaming rig Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wilhuf Posted September 7, 2001 Share Posted September 7, 2001 Discussion on the Quake3world forums indicates that SMP support for Q3 benefits only graphics rendering. SMP isn't used by the Q3 server software. The server won't thread to both CPUs. A pity too, since some server admins already use dual CPU rigs for game serving. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rancor Posted September 7, 2001 Share Posted September 7, 2001 Bah, with the current speed of CPU's and GPU's...and with no end in sight in this area, multiple processor support for games doesn't make sense...unless of course it becomes the standard. As it is, it must be hellish to develop games to run on a reasonable cross-section of computers that the current gamers are likely to have. Then to have to support multiple processors for the 2%(just guessing) that even have them right now? It sounds like, until it becomes the standard, there are much better places to invest game engineering time and energies. That's not to trounce on anyone, just stating my opinion on the matter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Red_XIIII Posted September 7, 2001 Author Share Posted September 7, 2001 rancor Comps with more then 1 cpu inem are quite a bit more common then 2%, and with CPU prices falling and AMD coming out with a PRocessor they can use for duel quad combos, its more likely will c even more. Intels Prices are just way to high 269$ for a 1.2ghz Tutalan PIII with jus 256k of L2... when u can get that Athlon 1.4ghz Thunderbird for around 100$ tho the thunder isnt SMP capable. AMD is Likey to capture the SMP maket if they realse somthing faster then their thunderbird and is SMP capable +cheap, I'd imagine alot of Dual rig Linux systems would pop up among the gaming community for hosting games. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rancor Posted December 2, 2001 Share Posted December 2, 2001 This is an old topic, but just looking back at it....yes, you are correct. More than 2% of computers have more than one processor. But of those computers, most are probably servers or are used for things other than playing games. Frankly, I don't know of anyone that has a multiple cpu computer for the purpose of playing games. I'm sure they are out there, but they aren't the norm. Another post was also correct, I read that Quake3 has multiple processor support, but that it's really only for the renderer. So, I'd imagine that in some cases, the additonal processor might offer little speed improvements. Finally, I'm not entirely sure that multiple processors will become the norm anytime soon since most software really needs to be written to take advantage of that situtation...and most software isn't written that way. It's one of those Catch-22 situations....most people don't want to invest in dual processors because there isn't much software out there to even take advantage of it. And since there aren't many consumers demanding dual processor support, most software companies aiming at the average consumer aren't willing to put in the extra development time and cost to make it take advantage of a dual processor environment. On the other hand, I'm not too familiar with what kinds of benefits it might lend to the OS that the game is running under....and if the OS is able to spread the game execution out to multiple processors in a way that would even work correctly. So, from what I understand, even in this situation, you probably won't get much of a speed gain for software that is not written to take advantage of multiple processors. I guess single cpu's are just so dang cheap and relatively fast that multiple processors are something that few people really have a need for? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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