Quake III Arena & Dual Processors

[noackjr]

Yes, if there were decent drivers everything would be fine. But don't expect any decent NT drivers - I've been waiting for those for over 6 months now and none have arrived. I hope Matrox will put out SMP Win2000 drivers, though. That's a lot more likely than NT ones.

Jon

[nufan]

does it look like this?
<a href="http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum4/HTML/002890.html">http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum4/HTML/002890.html</a>

anyways.. the win2k drivers run pretty well while you're actually playing, but tend to crash in the menus.

as far as performance goes, on my dual celeron 550, i was getting right around 40 fps on 8x6 in non-smp mode with bilinear on and 16 bit textures on. I think i also turned up texture detail to the max .

-]nufan[-

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win98/win2k/linux
Dual celeron 366@550
abit bp6
128mb ram
9gb udma/66
18gb udma/66(running on the udma/33 controller)
g400 32mb DH
yamaha 4416e 4x4x16 cdrw
creative 2x dvd drive
mx300sound + mx25 digital out (a3d digital sound, baby)
generic ne2000 isa netcard



[This message has been edited by nufan (edited 15 February 2000).]

[apwelch]

yes it looks very similar to that!

I have RC2 of W2K at home but haven't installed it on my dual system as I'm waiting for the release version in a few days - I'm sticking with NT4 at the moment.

W2K will probably be worth it for the DX7 support etc and have better dual processing capabilities.

[Axatax]

BTW - SMP DOES work in Q3A but only in a windowed mode. When you fire up the game, hit ALT-ENTER to go into a window. I know this not what we want, but the screen corruption will be gone.

BTW - SMP is NOT supposed to give you a higher framerate necessarily. I loose ~18 FPS with SMP - however, the game runs VERY smooth. So smooth infact it is distracting at first. Your frame rate won't matter when you've tried this - trust me.

[apwelch]

Quake III Arena & Dual Processors

I've tried running Quake III Arena under NT (to try out the dual processor acceleration by setting r_smp to 1) and the game looks horrendous - all colours of the rainbow and the menu's are corrupted and unreadable, and the ID splash screen didn't work.

If I set it to 800x600 in 32bit colour I can see what's going on but the performance is terrible and faster when r_smp is 0.

I've applied the Q3 point release which added a FAQ saying at the moment it only works 'properly' on TNT based cards.

would the G200 support SMP if Matrox released some decent drivers or is there a third party alternative?

------------------
Andrew Welch

Supermicro P6DBE board
Dual PII 400mhz
Matrox Millennium G200 16MB
Intel Pro 100+ ethernet
Soundblaster Live 1024
128MB PC100 SDRAM
Pioneer 6x DVDROM
Mitsumi 4801TE CDR
Fujitsu 10.2GB EIDE
Western Digital 3.2GB EIDE
Windows 98 SE
Windows NT4 SP6a

[PaulS]

Axatax, SMP should not run slower than UNI, it is a problem with the drivers.

Paul

[paulcs]

Paul is correct. Assuming everything was working, you would get a big increase in framerates: 20 to 30%.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 16 February 2000).]