ATI Products and SMP

W

Woulff

New member
Anyone know if ATI cards have support for SMP? I have a dual PIII 800 with a Rage Fury Pro 32mb running W2K Pro. I enabled SMP support in Quake III and it runs slower! :mad: After some reading I found out that only a few cards have support for SMP. ATI is not on the list. :confused: I have a Radeon on backorder (who doesn't). I sure hope it has support for SMP.

[This message has been edited by Woulff (edited 08-08-2000).]
 
To my knowledge the video card does not need to support smp, nor do i think any of them do. If they did it would most certainly be a driver issue. we have a tnt2 ultra running quake3 on win2k pro, and it runs faster with smp enabled. did you install win2k with both processors onboard? if you did not and added another processor later, it will not run them in smp. you have to reinstall win2k for it to recongnize the second processor.
 
Q3 is a dual-threaded application.

According to John Carmack:

All OpenGL calls (the renderer) occur in one thread and EVERYTHING else (sound, network, AI, physics, input) occur in another thread.

Q3 SMP mode often helps your WORST case framerate (heavy firefights), but usually lowers your BEST case scores due to overhead in the SMP implementation.

Carmack did quite a bit of investigating different methods and combinations of threading for Q3 and came to the conclusion that is just wasn't worth the effort. So, he cut Q3 into 2 threads, gave us the ability to turn that off (back to 1 thread), and called it good.

You CAN turn on Q3 SMP-support without actually having an SMP compliant system. It will give you reduced performance, due to overhead, but it will work. Only really useful for benchmarking the overhead that multi-threading injects into Q3.

Your Video card drivers have nothing to do with SMP support in Q3.

Hope that helps.

Rory


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Manaknight:

the old UPTOMP.exe utility that was used in NT 4.0 to upgrade your uniprocessor HAL to a multiprocessor HAL still exists in Win2k.

If you dl and install the Win2k resource kit, you'll have access to the UPTOMP.exe utility.

Not that I've had good success using it....

I blew the OS (NT 4.0) right up when I attempted to use UPTOMP after we picked up a 2nd processor.

Microsoft Technet does have several articles about how to BACK OUT the UPTOMP.exe utility.

None of them are particularly clean and it USUALLY is faster to just re-install everything. If you have a production server that you did UPTOMP.exe on, you'd better have a GOOD backup and valid ERD on hand or you may be crying yourself to sleep :)

It certainly does work better to do it right the first time.

Rory

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This is from the Quake III Arena FAQ.

"How do I enable Multiprocessing Support SMP)?

Quake 3 Arena does have support for multiprocessors (SMP). In order to get the benefits from SMP, you must be running Windows NT 4.0 and have a compatible video card and driver combination. Right now, The Detonator drivers for the TNT and GeForce generation of cards are the only ones that are working properly. To enable the support, bring down the console with the ~ key and type the command

\r_smp 1 Follow this command with

\vid_restart
"

Thanks for you input.

Oh, and W2K was installed with both CPUs

[This message has been edited by Woulff (edited 08-08-2000).]
 
To my knowledge, drivers ARE the problem.
NVidia supports SMP, 3dfx does not.
I tested it myself, Riva TNT works, 3dfx does not.

And ATI? Probably not either... shame.
 
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