Parhelia and SMP

[Dogbert]

Is there any info about Parhelia and SMP ?
Does any of the BBZ have a Dual CPU computer ?

How well does it get along with other periferals (SB Live! comes to mind) ?

[Jupp]

Check the Parhelia thread in General Hardware on the Matrox support forums.

AFAIR Haig said in the other thread that Parhelia drivers aren't multi-threaded.


R.

[Fenrir(AVA)]

I am running an SMP system to....wonder if that would drastically effect the card. GF4 and Radeon 8500 only has about 10-12 fps less then a single chip system. Hopefully this won't hurt the card. The perphials I think the most notorious card is the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum, has a thing were it clicks and echos in games, and skips in mp3's and apparently its not just me who gets it.

[isochar]

Try the new Compaq Audigy drivers. Solve almost everything. (Still have click/static here and there)

[CaineTanathos]

I have also a SMP system (2x p3 866)

at the moment I have a Ti200 , no alot of problems.

only sometimes when I play a game and winamp is also running, it could result in a bluescreen, that doesn't happen mu

the drivers of ATI aren't multithreaded eather (but they suck anyway)

[Snake007uk]

it doesnt matter as much as multi threaded drivers more that it doesnt cause blue screens like the audigy and plays well, also the fps, and quality of the card iotself does decrease too much

Snake

[DGhost]

the only real reason multithreaded drivers would be good is on cards that do not have onboard T&L or for situations where the CPU is doing the work for the video card. in such cases multithreaded drivers would improve performance by removing the CPU as the bottleneck (or at least lessening the problem).

I would have loved for the G400's to have some form of multithreaded OpenGL drivers, as it would have given a boost on my system when i used a dually for my main computer.

biggest problem i always found with SMP systems is that a lot of drivers cannot handle switching between processors too well. setting the affinity of the device to one processor usually fixed some problems, although in my case it usually caused more =)

also, the SB cards are not the greatest choice if you are running SMP. never had good luck with them on SMP systems.