ATI 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? (Tried the video forum a few hours ago, but no reply)

 

[GoodRevrnd]

What's SMP?

 

[ai42]

What's SMP?

symmetric multiprocessing

Well as far as hardware support? or drivers? Theoretically it would just be a software issue. But its not like ATI cards wont run just not with SMP optimization.

 

[dawks]

Well im sure if you put a ATI card in an dual CPU system (SMP), it would work fine in 2d. And it should work fine in 3d. But the key is, in a game such as Quake 3, if you enabled r_smp (r_smp "1"), would the game still run? Would you see any performance benefit?

I think it should just be a software issue, so have they encorporated it into the drivers yet?

 

[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.

 

[MadRat]

Q3 supports SMP on the server side, but did it ever support SMP on the client side?

 

[dawks]

Originally posted by: MadRat
Q3 supports SMP on the server side, but did it ever support SMP on the client side?

Always did, and should still.. I never heard anything about them taking it out. I do remember very clearly SMP benchmarks, and the only capable game was Quake 3.. I remember there was one set of nVidia drivers that would always blue screen when r_smp was enabled in quake 3.. they fixed it with the next release.

I am wondering if all the games based on the Quake 3 engine support SMP also..

Im just curious.. I am sort of planning an upgrade from my PII 400 to Dual Athlon MP's.. and wonder if I'll have to replace my ATI Radeon 7500..

 

[Rand]

I am wondering if all the games based on the Quake 3 engine support SMP also..

I havent heard of ANY other Quake3 engine games ever supporting SMP, and given the stigma attached to Q3's implementation I can't blame them. From all I've seen enabling SMP in Q3 usually cost performance due to the overheard, and most significantly bandwidth contention between processors.

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: 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.

yeah I read in some intereview that it just "disappeared" with one of the updates, no one noticed

 

[SUOrangeman]

I'd hop over to forums.2cpu.com. I've seen some posts in the Motherboard area pertaining to video card problems (yes, some mentions of ATi are there). If I'd expect anyone to know, it would be them. My GF2MX card has no prolem with my pair of Athlons.

-SUO