A whole bunch o' name dropping

[giskard]

Greebe, Paulcs, Guru, Rags.

I seem to remember one of you guys having a dual celery rig... If i've totaly missed the mark please give this post the disdain that it deserves...

I've just managed to score a dual celery 466\abit combo with a g40016mb card. It's a pretty groovy setup. Only caveat at this stage is sub-optimal q3a performance. I'm getting around 52FPS on demo 1 @ 640x480 with pretty much all the warm fuzzy bits turned off.

Is this par for the course? If not, Could someone sling me a good URL for cfg tweaking, or better still, an optimised cfg (no, i'm not after anyones cdkey)?

I'm currently running the 5.20 win2k drivers. Any suggestions or advice? This is my first multi cpu setup, so i'm flying blind.

Cheers,

Giskard

[Technoid]

Well...
Carmack did'nt include that much smp code in Q3 and the DH 16MB is the slowest G400.
Celleron 466 is also not the fastest chip even in dual..

Is your mobo an bx or via?

[paulcs]

Did you enable SMP in the game? If so, what sort of scores are you getting with SMP disabled? SMP should help at 640x480 and 800x600/16-bit.

The console command, if memory serves me correctly is

r_smp 1

The last time I tried this with a G400, I got some very psychedelic effects. That was a while ago.

Quake3 likes a fast front side bus. Yesterday, I tested a PIII 550E @ 733 (5.5 x 133) and it performed noticably better than an PIII 800 (8 x 100). I was using a GeForce2 Ultra, so the videocard was never a bottleneck. The 100 MHz memory bus appeared to be the problem. Your situation is worse because of the Celeron's 66 MHz bus.

I think Q3 also benefits from SSE, and the older Celeron's don't support these instructions.

I sincerely doubt SMP will ever be a major (or minor!) factor in gaming. It only has a positive effect at low resolutions and bit depths, and I've seen it slow things down as visual settings are increased and the videocard is stressed. Sometimes I think John Carmack just opened a can of worms by adding SMP support in Quake3.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 30 November 2000).]

[giskard]

Technoid: The mobo is a bx(abit). I know i'm not breaking speed records with this machine, but it's great for what i'm using it for.

Paul: Thanks for the suggestions. I haven't tried enabling SMP in Q3A - will give it a try. I thought that the Matrox drivers fell over when Quake was run in smp mode.

Cheers,

G

[Gurm]

Newer Matrox drivers (5.14 and up) work fine in SMP mode. Some random lockups after a long play period have been reported, but those are easily attributable to heat and/or sound cards (SBLive! BAD!!!).

You have to remember, though, that the G400 is a highly scalable card. What this means is that a Celeron 466 just won't push it very hard. Heck, my 600's don't push it very hard. (I'm running an Abit BP6 as well...)

And also remember that the G400 turns in dismal Q3 scores, as compared to Rodeon or GeFarce.

Also remember that the reason for using SMP is not the FPS gains, but the concurrency and multitasking gains.

And in Quake3, you will discover that it only boosts your average fps by a couple. HOWEVER, it will boost your MINIMUM framerates by quite a bit, which is substantially more important.

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[giskard]

Thanks Gurm,

I tried the SMP thing. Seemed to work best under load (lots of people running around), which is when you need it most. Thanks for the hints and tips everyone.

G

[superfly]

Actually the fps improvement in Q3 can be very substantial,it mostly depends on:

1.having a very fast video card with alot of fill rate

2.the improvement will also be very dependant on driver optimizations(anywhere between 30 to 70% improvement can be had).

The way Q3 was writen was to take advantage of the second cpu only when needed,it's called a sleeping syncronisation method.

In my case(yes,using a Gefarce 2 64 meg... ),i get the following using all options enabled(including sound)and at HQ settings(32 bit color,no texture compression used)

Dual p3 667

640*480---->132 fps(+30 fps)
800*600---->115 fps(+20 fps)
1024*768--->91 fps(+7 fps)

The most important thing is that the minimum fps never goes below 60 fps,no matter how much activity there may be on screen).

Can't wait to try it with a dual 1 ghz p3 setup... .