ATI based cards and SMP..?

[dawks]

Do ATI cards support SMP yet? I havent noticed anything on this topic in a long time. But If I recall correctly, only nVidia cards did.. r_smp on Quake 3 and Quake 3 based games would not work unless you had an nVidia card.. Is this still the case?

 

[Rand]

If your referring to 2D apps or Pro3D applications then yes, ATi's boards do perfecly support and take advantage of multiprocessing. In-sofar as games are concerned I've no idea.... the only game I know of that ever supportd SMP was Quake3 and it's implementation was extremely minimal and pretty crappy to be blunt.

If I recall correctly they removed SMP from the later revisions of Q3 in fact.

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

in Q3, the difference between SMP enabled and non enabled is a few frames at most. Hardy any SMP action at work really.

 

[Rand]

Originally posted by: PeeluckyDuckee
in Q3, the difference between SMP enabled and non enabled is a few frames at most. Hardy any SMP action at work really.

From what I've seen one more frequently loses performance with SMP in Quake3... sometimes to a hefty degree due to the overhead and bandwidth contention between processors.