G400+Win2k+Dual CPU?

[everettes]

Will their be a noticeable difference running the G400 with Dual PIII500's as opposed to Single under Windows 2000?

Seeing how the G400's performance is tied so close to CPU speed, will the drives use both under DirectX?

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PIII550, Intel SE440BX-2, 2 x 128 Kingston PC100 ECC, 2940U2W, Seagate Cheetah, G400-32 SH, Plextor 8\20, Plextor 40Max, Pioneer 303s, SBLive!, MS FFPro, Altec Lansing ACS-48, Sony CDP 520GS

[paulcs]

In games or apps?

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[PaulS]

everettes, if you are talking about OpenGL speed it only helps if the video driver is multithreaded. Because the G400 doesn't have T&L, a good driver can offload this to both processors, but Matrox's drivers don't do this. If you look at performance gains made by Matrox's SSE optimisations in the TurboGL, you can get an idea of how processor bound these drivers are - a multithreaded driver would make a significant difference.

ATI and 3DLabs have multithreaded OpenGL drivers though.

The DX7 drivers may be able to do this, because MS writes a lot of the code - but until we see the drivers...?

There are a lot other good reasons for adding that second processor though.

Paul

[paulcs]

Are there any games that support multiprocessors other than Quake3 (and has that support been implemented)?

Just for the sake of demonstration:

Quake3 test 1.08, 16-bit, "Normal" settings, 800x600

Single PIII 500, Windows 98se, Guillemot TNT Ultra: 60.3 fps

Dual PIII 500, Windows 2000, Guillemt TNT Ultra: 56.9 fps

Single PIII 600, Windows 98se, Matrox G400 Vanilla: 61.5

Maybe it's the drivers. Maybe the OS. Probably both. If there is an advantage in games right now, I haven't come across it.

As for true multitasking, dual processors are great. I'm running two SETI clients simultaneous on the dual processor machine, and I haven't noticed much of a slowdown from running a single client on one processor. (And I still haven't figured out how to assign processors.)

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[PaulS]

paulcs, at this stage only Q3 and the announced Q3 engine based games support smp. I understand that Q3 currently crashes on W2k in dual processor mode (it is a Quake bug) did you use smp flag to enable dual processor?

To change processor affinity and priority, open task manager and click on the Processes tab. Find the process you are interested in and right click to bring up the priority and affinity menus.

Paul.

[paulcs]

Thanks Paul. One day I figure out what to do with monster other than learning NT, testing video boards and drivers, and hunting for aliens.

I didn't enable dual processing in the game. I'll find the command and give it a try. What's one more crash.

Thanks again.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net