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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Quake3 to go SMP 168

Posted by Hemos from the fun-fun-fun dept.
schmack writes "Surfing the Id plans, John Carmack mentions he's working on SMP support for Quake 3. Although initially developed for NT, he says "it should definately make its way to the linux port...". Look for a speed up of 20% [worst case] to 80% in frame rate over a single CPU. This will mean "it will also be possible to build a reletively cheap SMP system (say, dual 400's) that outperforms the best single processor system." "
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Quake3 to go SMP More

Quake3 to go SMP

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  • Re:Now we need 3-d support (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Matrox G200 is about as close as you're going to get. It's still alpha/beta, though, and Matrox hasn't given out ALL the specs, so it's never going to be very fast, but it's the closest thing to what you describe (without buying stuff from a commercial driver vendor). Maybe NVidia will have a driver soon, and all will be well. About AGP, though, Intel refuses to release the specs on that, so you stand no chance of using it unless you're on a VIA chipset (even then there's no actual support yet, just specs)
  • I thought Carmack already posted something explaining that the gain would be too small to warrant an SMP version and abandoned his previous attempt.

    But, this does look authentic. Perhaps someone can help me out. I truly seem to remember some months ago carmack suggesting and then abandoning SMP support for Q3. Am i crazy?

    -matt

  • yes! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    another game to use SMP.
    Falcon 4.0 supports SMP as well.

    Now I upgrade my puney 400 to 466 celerons for Q3.

    Isn't it funny that the only compelling reason to upgrade my computer is for games?

  • Re:Q3 plays great on my machine (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Voodoo [1,2,3] cards are all 3D only accelerators. You must have a 2d card in order to have 2d graphics :) (well actually there *are* XFree drivers so that you can use a voodoo2 as a 2d card but there is no reason to do this unless you only have 2 voodoo2's.) A combination voodoo2 (called Voodoo2 SLI) is where the voodoo2's are combined for a higher frame rate and greater resolution. A single voodoo2 can only do 800x600 @ so many frames per second (limited by your CPU). A voodoo2 SLI allows you to nearly double (again depending on your system) your frame rates and run quake for instance in 1024x768. A voodoo3 allows you to run 1024x768 also. Again, voodoo2 SLI does not necessarily mean twice the fps (frames per second) or resolution. If you have a 450 MHz or 500+ then you will reach the limit of the voodoo2 series. I'm not sure what maxes out the voodoo3 line or which one. There are multiple different types of voodoo3's...both PCI and AGP versions as well. I would be wary of the voodoo[1,2,3] line because of the 16 bit colors. Take a good look at the TNT2 cards. They are 32 bit color and are better. The trade off is of course the drivers. Not as many people support the TNT2 and most everyone supports voodoo[1,2,3]. Case in point is the Quake3Arena test which when it first came out would only run on 3DFX chips (voodoo series). The diamond v770 ultra TNT2 is rumored to be fully supported by Linux because diamond is working with XFree86. I wouldn't hold my breath though. Check out www.sharkyextreme.com for an article on the hurcules TNT2 card. For any hardware need, no one beats: www.tomshardware.com
  • Imagine what that will do for SMP system sales - that will be the breakthrough that will put SMP systems on every desktop.

    No. No. Don't laugh.

  • Re:Clarification... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I love how people discuss making a truly multi-threaded game as if it's not much harder. In truth, coding a fully threaded game is INCREDIBLY difficult. You might be suprised to know that most games today are not threaded. It's hard enough as it is.

  • BeOS (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @05:10AM (#1887023)
    In true /. style the "story" is incomplete: Carmack goes on to say "I know SMP is a que for all the BeOS folks to ask about ports, so I'm going to head that off: Be has all the code for Q3 (and Q2, for that matter), and a version of Q3test should be available by the time they ship a release OS with OpenGL hardware acceleration. "

    This release is due in the next 3-4 weeks BTW so hopefully a month from now we'll be playing SMP Quake 2&3 on BeOS. Apparently a basic quick and dirty Quake->BeOS port was done in 1 day, and the full port in a week. I don't know if this was a port to a UNIX-like single thread process or if it takes advantage of any of the BeOS features. However given the ease of use of the Be API im sure it will be relatively easy to at least divide the rendering into 2 or more threads to take advantage of SMP.
  • Carmack did experiment with it some time ago, but by then he didn't get any speed up... search for an older entry in his plan. (It was last year some time...)

    /AE
  • If Linux doesn't run well overclocked chances are that other applications will suffer as well. Anyway, I've heard that it is much more difficult to overclock a PPGA Celeron in a S370-S1 converter than a PPGA Celeron in a pure S370 configuration.

    /AE
  • You can get about two PII@400 for the price of one PIII@500...

    The mother board is a bit more expensive of course, but you get my point...

    /AE
  • So then how do you explain why all the video card manufacturers are now coming out with OpenGL drivers? I'm sure it's not M$ pushing them to do it. Quite the contrary, M$ wants to push Direct3D. ID broke the ice with glquake, and ID's games and derivatives have had enough market share to get the video card manufacturer's attention. Add to that Carmack's donation to the Mesa project, and I'd say that one single game comany is making a change in the industry.
  • Have you ever thought that perhaps they were too busy or just plain missed it?

    Or perhaps they (or the story submitter) have a tad of a Linux bias...

    They do it out of there free time, not like they are getting payed: They have more then enough right to miss a stuff and screw up and spell things wrong.

    No, they are doing this as a job, and they get paid. Rob himself mentioned that Slashdot is now his only source of income, as he has no other job. It's a job that they do for a living, and *do* get paid for, so what you say above does not apply.
  • *sigh*

    Read his post again. Your reply has nothing to do with his post. His post is saying that an SMP system will speed up even a single-threaded game, as long as the OS itself is multi-threaded. The game can run on one CPU, while the OS uses the other CPU for the network, disk, and video overhead.
  • I never said I don't appreciate Rob's work, or don't like slashdot. I was merely correcting the previous poster's erroneous statement that slashdot is a non-profit endeavor, since it does indeed make money.
  • Posted by Soco:

    BeOS shall own you especially when it comes to SMP.
  • Posted by ekauq:

    Well, heh , what scares me now is that its to much games , and they are controlling the development . Instead of makin the games after the (for example in this case the processors) the industry is makin the processors after the games.
    And it is that way with all computer stuffs. The games have taken controll now. I`m a good example , I play Quake1 4 houres aday so I waste my time that should sit down and programmin on. It`s just to much games.
    Games like nethack,Pacman and Moria was ok cause those were "nice" while games like quake just are , nice in a strange kind of way.
    More like a drug.
    scary.
  • Does anyone out there know what to look for in a good SMP motherboard?

    I'd like to build a dual PII-450 system, but Intel's MoBo prices are somewhat out of line, and I don't want to get stuck with a flaky board that hangs every half hour.

    Suggestions?

    TedC

  • Thanks for the info. I noticed that VA Research is using a Tyan motherboard for some of their SMP systems, so they must be pretty good.

    TedC

  • Thanks for the links. I'm leaning toward the thunderbolt at the moment, assuming that the onboard sound/SCSI/ethernet are all supported by Linux.

    TedC

  • Now I finally can justify converting my Dual P2 from NT to Linux and running Q3test on it. And to think my friends told me to yank one CPU and go with 95.

  • After getting past the "Cool" response above, I thought a little more...

    If the underlying OS supports SMP and is written to a threaded model, then any application running on top of it is going to benefit from the extra horsepower - moreso if the app itself is also threaded...

    I can't believe that JC didn't write Q3 using threads, so is the new version going to subvert the OS's thread-to-CPU allocation process, or what?

    Any thoughts?

  • IIRC, JC tried to dedicate one CPU to "game" and the other to "render", but the overhead of pushing state information around ate up any performance gains, and then some...

  • What I was trying to say (but missed out half a sentence) is that all the other "background" OS stuff, like the disk I/O, network stack, and perhaps even the video driver will get to run without the OS having to interfere with the game.
  • SuperMicro (www.supermicro.com) do a wide variety of dual CPU capable mobos, with varing degrees of on-board goodness.

    I have a P6DBS from them with (currently) a single P2-400. No problems, and not too expensive (about $300 18 months ago) given the built-in, dual channel Adaptec SCSI.

    The down side of boards like this is that they are engineered to work, rather than to facilitate over-clocking. Don't expect BIOS-based voltage or FSB control.

    However, I've ordered a pair of the Celery 333's I mentioned earlier, as they should just plug in and work...

  • Way cool... (Score:3)

    by YuppieScum ( 1096 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @04:53AM (#1887041) Journal
    ...now that companies are starting to offer combos of Celeron 300a and 333 PPGAs, together with an MSI-6905 Slot 1 adapter card (that supports SMP) and absurd cooling - guaranteed to run at 450Mhz and 500Mhz respectively.

    Hands up who wants a 1000Mhz workstation for less than a grand?
  • XFree says my Banshee is accelerated but the doc clearly says there is no 3D acceleration yet (like with the PCI 3DFx).

    But it should not be too long before we get full support for the beasts.

    And my SMP box will be so happy to outperform all Win9x users of Quake III ;)

  • nope! (Score:2)

    by Juju ( 1688 )
    I don't think so!

    I have a dual PPGA 300A Celeron running at 450 flawlessly...

    The only problem when going dual is that you have to use the lowest working frequence of your CPUs.

    So if you have 70% chances of getting your overclocked CPU to run at a given frequency, you will have only 49% to get a dual running at the same speed.
  • Doesn't exist.
  • he tried it with q2, not q3, and the method used was different. he tried to dedicate one cpu to game and one to rendering and the bottleneck became sending information between the processors (if i remember right).

    asinus sum et eo superbio

  • I have a SuperMicro P6DGE with a single P2-333 oc'ed to 416 that has been very stable for me ever since I bought it in March. I would definitely recommend this board to anyone else looking for an SMP config, but make sure that the case you choose for such a system is large enough to accomadate the motherboard and has adequate cooling for your system's components.
  • Linux runs great overclocked, if the hardware is stable. I've got a PII-266 chip that's been running at 300 MHz (4x75) for at least 8 or 9 months now with no problems. It got a bit flakey at 333, but 300 is perfectly stable. Seriously considering picking up a second 266 and a dual motherboard and overclocking them both to 300. Problem is finding that second 266... doh!
  • Even if the app itself is single-threaded, the rest of the OS is multithreaded. That means that the OS can be processing tasks on the 2nd CPU while the app runs on the 1st. Granted, it's not as good as a multithreaded app, but there is still an overall speed improvement because the app can truly own a CPU. In a non-SMP system, the app has to share the CPU with the rest of the system.

    --
    Timur Tabi
    Remove "nospam_" from email address
  • There are Intel HX socket 7 boards that can do SMP with intel chips.

    As for Super7, according to Via's website, the(M)VP3 supports SMP - presumably Intel's MP standard, but no board maker has ever implemented it.

    The K6 supports SMP aswell, or rather it is OpenPIC compliant. But there are no socket7 boards that implement it. OpenPIC is cross platform however, and is used on PowerPC SMP boards. Also, Digital Equipment was another developer of OpenPIC, so it's possible that they implemented it somewhere as well.

    (what kind of PIC standard does the Alpha 21164 adhere to - anyone know?)
  • AFAIK:

    Intel implements the PIC on P6's on the CPU core. Previously on socket7 the interrupt controller was integrated into the chipset. (and before PIC's got integrated they were a seperate chip).

    OpenPIC specifies an external PIC, so as long as a CPU can work with an external PIC, then that CPU is SMP capable with openpic.

    So if the K6 works now with the PIC in your Via/intel/ALi chipset, there's no reason it shouldn't work with an OpenPIC compliant PIC. The K6 doesn't need to care much that the PIC is also interrupting a second/third/fourth CPU.

    the K6-III would make a great SMP chip i think. The problem with Socket7 SMP was always the shared L2 cache. But with k6-III you have an even better cache structure than P6 SMP, ie fast, chip specific L2 cache, plus a large global cache - P6 SMP lacks a global L3 cache.

    just a shame no super7 chipset maker wants to build OpenPIc into their chipset.

    ah well...
  • that will be the breakthrough that will put SMP systems on every desktop.

    It's already there in large corporations. My last company was rolling out dual PIIs on every desktop throughout Europe (~4000 seats).

  • Alpha info, straight from Brian Hook's .plan:

    May 12, 1999, part 5
    --------------------

    We still want to support DEC Alpha processors, but we can't find any
    3D accelerators for the AXP that will run Q3TEST well. If any hardware
    vendors are willing to rev their AXP drivers to support Q3TEST, please
    let me know.
  • I've really enjoyed my Tyan Thunder 100 (original BX version), but I haven't actually stuck a second CPU in it yet. They just released the Thunder 100's successor, the Thunderbolt.

    my mobo:
    http://www.tyan.com/products/html/s1836dluan-bx. html

    thunderbolt:
    http://www.tyan.com/products/html/s1837uang.html
  • I blew most of my morning getting the tatterd remains of a rarely-used Windows98 partition working again, just so I could play the Quake3 Test since there's such lousy 3-D support among hardware vendors under Linux.

    Does anyone know if there are any AGP video cards that have accelerated X-windows support and OpenGL support under Linux? It seems the Voodoo3 boards don't, and I'll be damned if I can find anyone who makes all-in-one Voodoo 2 cards that are confirmed to work under Linux.

    (I can say though, that I DO miss playing those quake-type games sometimes...) ;)
  • I've got three PCs running AGP cards just fine. AFAIK, AGP looks the same as PCI to Linux, only faster.

    Regardless, I've got one system with a Matrix Millenium G200 AGP running Linux, one with an ATI Mach 64 Rage AGP and my home system thats got an ATI Rage Pro.

    All three work beautifully in X.

  • Where do you see mention of GL support with the Voodoo3? The information on that site explicitly says X is supported with a beta server, but there is no 3-D support.

    Although this does seem to be the most promising possibility...
  • Check out the newsgroup 3dfx.glide.linux at news.3dfx.com or do a www.dejanes.com search for
    any recent postngs from Daryll Strauss (The 3D code man)

    The drivers are currently alpha, but some have them running on the Voodoo 3.

    The 2D X server has been around for a while and works great, supposedly.

    Ed
  • Seems that they've released a LOT of the specs for the chip- a chip that includes 80% of the MPEG2 decoding pipe in hardware (read: DVD support...)
  • yeah cool! i hope q3test will be out for BeOS in june/july, i still have a single cpu on my BeOS machine but i may change motherboard and cpu for Q3 :)
    --
  • Got two 466MHz Celerons going on a Tyan Board.

    Who needs to overclock!? Like someone said
    earlier, the chance that BOTH CPUs will over-clock
    just fine is not enough for me to risk getting
    stuck with 2x333 which are immediately at the
    bottom of the pile.

    Except in Quake3 :)

    -kabloie
  • Aww, taping pins would be fun!

    Seriously, Tomshardware has the lowdown on that. If you can get the teflon tape they talk about there, it doesn't look too bad.

    Beats drilling pins, anyway.

    I don't know of any pseudo slot to do the voltages.

    -kabloie
  • I think that it is real cool what John is doing. I see him as an artist or musician who is never satisfied with his work, and keeps pushing the envelope. I do however think that someone has lost touch with the "average" gamer. With a majority of people still running P200's, who is this being done for? I personally have 6 computers here at the house, 2 of which are Sparcs, and I would love to see SMP Quake3. I just can't help but thinking of the 16 year old going to a store and reading the side panel of a game...
    Minimun System Requirements:
    PIII500 (Dual PII400 Recommended)
    96 Megs of Ram (128 Recommended)
    12 Meg Frame Buffer (32 Recommended)

    Hell and I thought $49 dollars was steep for a game.

  • If the underlying OS supports SMP and is written to a threaded model, then any application running on top of it is going to benefit from the extra horsepower - moreso if the app itself is also threaded...
    No. Your statement applies only if the app is multithreaded. If the original app is not multithreaded (or multi-heavyweight-process'd), then it cannot make use of the extra processor. If there is only one process (heavy- or light-weight), then the scheduler will only place it on one processor. Any other processes might be executed on the other processor, but I doubt many people are going to be executing another CPU-intensive app while playing Quake.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • Bohn's first rule for scalability. If you're worried about bottlenecking the master node, try not to have a master node -- decentralize the supervisor functions.
    I suppose you could try to set up a QuakeWorld server on a cluster. If you're going to think in terms of "objects," though, you might be better off using a shared-object library such as a CORBA implementation instead of an MPI implementation.
    I also think you'd be smart to be careful about how you distribute the "world" -- a static distribution would make poor use of the processors (consider the case where all players are in the same general part of the world). But you don't want to go overboard with dynamic distribution ... set some minimum grain to avoid conjesting the network. I think a single room would be the absolute minimum.
    Christopher A. Bohn

  • Beowulf Cluster Support (Score:3)

    by EngrBohn ( 5364 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @05:21AM (#1887066)
    (sigh)
    Not too likely. The degree of rewriting alone would probably kill such a project. That it would probably slow down execution would not make it terribly popular. I'm assuming you're talking about using the cluster for a single player. You could, of course, use the cluster for multiple players (one per node), which is already built-in to Quake ... but that wouldn't be using the cluster as a Beowulf.
    FWIW, we're putting together a long-overdue Beowulf FAQ [pobox.com] that answers this and other questions.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • It's never the lack of processor that produces lag, I should know, I run a quake2 server. My quake server never goes above 40% CPU usage on a PII 266, and that is a fully loaded 16 player match. It is always the bandwidth of the service provider. And in addition to that, I run X and compile stuff during matches. I never hear a complaint..... Or maybe it's just the NT servers that are really laggy.... :)

  • This is a tad insane... (Score:4)

    by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @04:50AM (#1887068)
    Cool though it is... you have to wonder if its getting a little out of hand. Multiple processors for a game? How long before we make that leap of *needing* multiple processors, just as it now *needs* 3D acceleration. Scary...
  • How about Beowulf cluster support?
  • Yep, I guess he was in 'Future Crew'

    Also made Scream Tracker

    Unless Sami Tammilehto is a common name of course...
  • I just built a new machine. O/c celeron 300A(450), Abit Bh6 m/b. I bought an SiS 6326(AGP) as well.
    The Sis 6326 wouldn't work half the time, pulled it out, dropped in my old Viper V330 (PCI), now everything is fine.

    Oh yeah, RH6.0.

    On another note, My Fujitsu 6.4G drive (in same box) seems to need to warm up before it will work correctly. It was fine at 300Mhz, but screws up at 450. Anyone got any ideas ?


  • ok here it is..
    Voodoo 1 (voodoo graphics) is a 3d only card that works with an existing 2d video card to provid 3d hardware acceleration in glide and opengl (now)

    Voodoo 2 boards are also 3d only, and work in conjunction with an existing 2d video card.. these also are only avaiable in a pci card, however they support more ram then the origingal voodoo boards (8 or 12mb) and can be configured with 2 boards in an SLI (scan line interleave) mode (one board draws the even lines, the other the odd lines)

    Voodoo 3 is the latest product, its a single board solution 2d AND 3d .. available in a PCI or AGP format (no agp texturing though) and the 2d graphics processor has a 300mhz ramdac (I think)
    its available in 3 grades -
    The 2000 (pci or agp - 3d processor running at 143mhz)
    The 3000 (agp only - 3d @ 166 mhz I think)
    The 3500 (agp only, tv tuner - 3d @ 184mhz I think)

    They're pretty nice cards.. I just bought a pci version of the V3 2000 and I love it!


  • Way Cool indeed.

    If you can talk anybody into delivering an SMP box with 128x1.GHz Merceds with 16 GB of RAM in it for a reasonable amount of dough, I'll hock my car :-)

    Wow, that would make for some absolute killer 'Point-n-Shoot' games. Cyber-cannon-fodder with some real AI, man!

    -Charles
  • Beowulf clustering would make sense for a large Quake world, would it not? It should be relativly easy to divide up the world on different nodes and use MPI to only pass the objects that affect the current node. The only bad thing would be the network bottleneck of the "master" machine.

    Would be interesting to see something like this, kind of like Ultima Online, only as a FPS.


    Just a thought..
  • The popular Voodoo 1 and 2 cards are 3DFX accelerators... meaning, they work in conjunction with regular video cards to do all the nifty 3D rendering and so on... what he said about using 2 Voodoo2's is called SLI (i forget what the anacronym stands for, maybe someone can inform), and that's where you basically use 2 3DFX accelerators that work together to do all the 3D rendering... This makes for quite a nice setup...
    However, the Voodoo3's are a 3DFX accelerator and a regular 2D video card all-in-one combo card. Personally, I'll stick with Voodoo2 for now for the opportunity to add another in SLI for 24 MB of video RAM goodness...
    There are other great/decent/good 3DFX accelerators/cards out there like NVidia's stuff, but I won't get into that since you just mentioned Voodoo's....

    ----------------------------------------
    ...A view of the Universe functioning...
  • I've got three PCs running AGP cards just fine. AFAIK, AGP looks the same as PCI to Linux, only faster.


    True. However, if I understand correctly, you won't be able to use system memory for texturing without explicit AGP support. This is one of the primary benefits of AGP (especially with cards that let you read triangle setup data from AGP memory; bus-limit bottlenecks just got a lot wider).


    I don't know what kind of support this requires OS-side, but the previous post implied that AGP chipset specs are needed. Certainly the OS needs to be able to lock and unlock sections of memory for use with AGP. The graphics-card side AGP support isn't a problem if you have proper specs for the card (though that's a big "if").

  • Seems to me, if this kind of stuff catches on...

    2 K6-2 300s = ~$100
    1 P2 400 = ~$200



    But now to make the motherboards cheaper...
  • A more accurate comparison is this:

    2 P2-300s = ~$250
    1 P2-400 = ~$200

    *brain farted*
  • Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is the only reason why my PC at home now has 64 megs of ram instead of 32. ;)
  • I know you can't SMP Amd processors, that is why I took the time to reply to my own message, correcting myself.

    I still say it makes sense.
  • Amptron makes some inexpensive and from what I hear pretty good single and dual Slot 1 boards.
  • Win 98 isnt multi threaded like NT is. Don't plug in a second CPU into a Win 98 system unless you want a naughty kernel failure.
  • The problem is, in a game like quake, you can split off things like network communications, and other little shit like that, but it is hard to split up the process (meaning thing you're doing, not a 'user space process') that does most of the work: taking a memory representation of where things are and converting that into rendering information, and the CPU does have to help render some, even on a system with mad-assed cool 3d accelleration. Granted it can be done, as Carmack's success attests, but as you see, you can never do a full 50/50 split of the processor time, so you're very unlikely to get a 100% performance increase (even if there weren't any bacground/OS tasks running at the same time)
  • I agree. Although, I can see "needing" hardware dedicated to 3D. It involves a lot of floating point (well, fixed point if you really want speed) math and some trig.

    As far as bad code, I think it may be more of "Well, now most people have 200MHz machines... we don't need to spend so much time optimizing." Of course, having faster machines means getting you existing code to fly rather than an opportunity to become lazy.
  • Well id Software with Hovertank (and actually Wolf3d) did create the FPS popularity and thus all this stuff about 3D cards and extremely large multiplayer matches and such. It took a while to get the ball rolling, but id did the pushing.

  • It's a bit surprising that the app isn't multithreaded. I haven't played Quake 3, and I hear that it's all net-play (e.g. no AI opponents) but I would still expect that there's plenty of things to parallelize. I guess Carmack never bothered to deal with it -- but now he is!! Hooray!

    I guess multithreading would have made more sense back before 3D hardware was common and the CPU had to draw everything. I always though Wolf3D would really fly if only I had a CPU to raycast every pixel. ;-)

    This is actually extremely cool, as it should draw more attention to SMP systems. If SMP gets a bit more entranched, multithreaded apps will become the norm. :-) Seriously, "little" things like this are what causes long-term trends. The x86 would probably be a thing of the past if it weren't for Id Software's earlier titles. ;-P

  • Re:This is a tad insane... (Score:3)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @05:50AM (#1887087) Homepage Journal

    Well, you can always play the old games on the old hardware.

    Parallelism (and 3D processors are really just a specialized case of it) is seen by many to be "the final frontier" and the only other significant way to make computers faster. Everybody's known it for years, but the mainstream never got around to embracing it. So the computer dudes had to trick us into it, little by little. They started with simple things, like the Amiga's blitter, which made the computer seem a lot faster than it really was. Then DSPs got a bit popular for a while, and then 3D processors. Now we're at the logical conclusion for coprocessors, where the "coprocessors" are really just general-purpose processors, and they don't have to hide it anymore, since Id is doing it. If a mainstream company like Id is doing it, then the point-haired folks will finally accept it.

    It's not really any more scary than the "fact" that the games next year will require a faster machine than the one you have today.

  • Tekram has a decent dual board thats about $170, and claims to work up to dual 700mhz p3's. its also got an award bios which i like very much. I don't remember the product code, but its their only dual board.


  • They really do *everything* right.
    - Release the source of old games.
    - Port to Linux/Mac/BeOS/Irix.
    - Piss of Microsoft by using OpenGL. ;)
    - Make decent games.
    - And now, do SMP.

    Me like ID Software. Great people do great things.
  • What are you talking about, this is great. This is allowing me to build a cheap dual-celeron 450 and get better than Pentium-3 performance. (under $500 w/SCSI3 on board for MB+CPUs)

    SMP is great.
  • If you were working in game programming around the time that Direct3D came out, you would been yelled at by Alex St. John about how much better Direct3D's brain dead "Execute Buffer" scheme was than OpenGL. If it wasn't for Chris Hecker at M$ and John Carmack, OpenGL wouldn't be nearly as well supported as it is today, despite being superior in EVERY way to Direct3D. Funny side note: In D3D v5, they ditched execute buffers for a OpenGL style interface, but they couldn't admit ogl was better and start using that, they had to clone it (poorly) and use that. Microsoft set the 3D gaming world back by at least a year.
  • Nope.

    They don't exist. However, the K7 should make a limited appearance in June.
  • Linux doesn't run any worse overclocked than Win95/98 (the crash standard). Linux will do an abrupt reboot if the processor is incorrectly overclocked. Win95/98 will hang or crash during boot. WinNT will give a BSOD before it gets to the log-in prompt. I know this because I had my Celeron333 improperly o'c to 500 before I saw the SharkyExtreme [sharkyextreme.com] way of properly overclocking a Celeron. Now, I can watch full screen Quicktime 4.0 trailers without skipping. (Oh yeah, those new Linux kernels compile rather rapidly, too...)
  • So you grab and OC 2 Celery 300As to 450, pop in two PGP(?) linked Ultra TNT2s to further accelerate the system, a 3d PCI sound card to deal with all the sound effects and processing, and pop in Quake3Arena at 1600x1280 or something...

    *Should* be playable. Otherwise, just drop down to 1280x1024 or something =)

    Gosh, but this is so incredibly cool.


    -AS
  • I have to agree with Psiren...I admit my system is a little outdated, but I don't have the cash to be continuously running out to buy the latest and greatest in hardware just so that I can play a game. Don't get me wrong, I love to play Quake, but I think the thought of a game this day and age *requiring* multiple processors is a pretty scary thought (and possibly a little costly depending on where you shop and what you buy).


    --
  • I have to admit, the possibility of Quake3 on a quad G4 is a good enough reason for Johnnie to support SMP.
  • I'm seriously considering buying a dual-cpu motherboard in my next PC. The only thing is, I don't want to use Windows NT! Hardly any games run on it, and it's slowwwww. Heh...maybe if I could dual boot 98 and NT I could justify a 2-cpu gaming machine...
  • Seeing as I just bought a new 19", my old 15" can now have a purpose! Well...the game looks better on 19"...and I won't be paying any attention to the non-quake screen...but it'll still be cool have 2 monitors! woohoo!

  • SLI (Score:1)

    by ioctl ( 19935 )
    SLI stands for Scan Line Interleave. One card gets a scan line, the other the next, then the first gets the next after that, ad infinitum. It's effectively like having a single card with 4 texture units on it, each having their own private 4 megs of texture memory. And I agree, voodoo2 SLI is the way to go right now, if you can afford it.
  • As far as I can tell, it doesn't have all the
    instructions necessary for a full accelerated opengl. I ran quake 2 with it, and it seems to slow to a crawl whenever there is a muzzleflash on the screen.
  • Form follows function.

    Id graphics were created on SGI, pre-playing & testing the games on a PC with an OpenGL video card was a natural.

    It wasn't a virtue of Id, just plain laziness.

    BN

  • It is important that a system match the job it is tasked with.

    If networking doen't cause too much latency, then often a network of single processor machines is easier than one multiprocessor machine.

    Depends on the appliation.

    BN
  • Hmm quakeIII with SMP support for linux and NT. Looks like one of these two systems due to this fact alone could become the new gaming standard. (assuming rumors of hardware support are true) Guess which one.. I'll give you 2 guesses and the first one doesn't count

  • I had two PII333's overclocked to 500 running smoothyly until my peltiers dripped on my board :(
    I had them at standard 2.0volts- they seem to need to be at 2.3 volts with a little bit of a load to keep them warm enough so the condensation doesnt form - doh!

    For the moment Im now running one in a cheap bx6v2 board and have no problems -

    Im thinking of gettting that cheap mother board that the power 2 u dude PC uses - EPOX EP-KP6-BS and sticking both of them in again.

    I haven't read up on the slockets - Is there a slot adapter for basically just doing the voltage? (IE my cards are already slot 1 and dual capable - but I don't want to tape any pins.)




  • Are you sure you're not thinking of tnt2 drivers for linux? I remember that one a couple weeks ago on ./ but not anyting on voodoo3.

  • NT, if you have enough ram (at least 64MB, 128 is better) is slightly faster than 9x on the same machine.
  • Does anybody know of any super 7 smp boards? Is there even a chipset that can do that?
  • Really? Why would that be? Something to do with the adapters?

    I was running dual P2300s on an FX chipset until one cpu died, so I decided to upgrade to a BX board and give the PPGA with converter thing an option. 65$ for each PPGA (300a) about 120$ for adapters, cooling, and shipping (might not have been the best price, but seemed fair (www.computernerd.com)). I plugged the PPGAs into the adapters and booted up to make sure everything worked. It did. I shut down, jumpered the MB to 100mHz, rebooted and have been running dual 300a PPGAs at 450mHz for a couple of weeks now without any problems. CPU temp rarely gets above 30C and is usually 1-2C above the MB temp (although I'm not sure how the cpu temp is being measured, which goes to show that I'm no hardware guy!)

    All in all, I couldn't be happier. I guess if I got it done for less maybe... Only thing that would have made it easier would be for someone to come in and do it for me, but that's not as fun. :)

  • Re:This is a tad insane... (Score:3)

    by Beuser ( 30503 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @05:50AM (#1887112)
    From my point of view the fact that SMP is not being used more is what's insane (and not just in games, I think it should be almost everywhere...I'm nuts, though, so take that with a grain of salt). You can make use of cheaper CPU's and get better performance (depending on what you're doing of course, but I hope you see my point). Since PC's are used for so many different tasks at once, why not divide up the work? Even if app developers don't want to worry about threads, if the OS is designed to do the juggling you can experience much of the benefit.
  • > needing* multiple processors, just as it now
    > *needs* 3D acceleration.

    Well, your 3d accelerator card IS another processor, just dedicated to graphics. Personally, I'm all for multiple processors. If I can load Linux on a Sun E4000 and use ten processors for the screen, one for the game logic, and one of everything else -- and get some sort of super-reality game, heck, sign me up!
  • > the *needing* of 3d acceleration can hardly
    > be scary.

    For games to 'jump to the next level', you need new hardware. Quake and what not wouldn't be Quake without the 3D cards. We'd all be stuck playing Master of Orion or something. :)

    If taking advantage of new technology allows for a breakthrough in gaming... be it quality, complexity, or a complete new genre, go for it. It will only 'require' new hardware to the extent that the new hardware makes the entire thing possible.

    [However, games that require mulitprocessors for apparently no reason should be SHOT.]
  • Even better would be a network type environment where you could install a client on other machines throughout the office and to suck their idle CPU time from their systems and turn it into a hyper-reality gaming experience for you. :)

    "Don't use your computer's idle time to search for aliens... use it to kill them!" -- Quake's new marketing line.
  • You can't use the AMD processors in dual processor configurations. Intel uses a different interrupt controller (APIC) which lets them use multiple processor configurations.
  • > Does anyone know if there are any AGP video
    > cards that have accelerated X-windows support
    > and OpenGL support under Linux? It seems
    > the Voodoo3 boards don't,

    Umm, there IS support for Voodoo3 under Linux for both X-windows and Q3A. http://glide.xxedgexx.com has the goods. Daryll Strauss, the maintainer, just released a glide port for the V3 that the author says works with Q3A.

    Dodger_

  • Re:Now we need 3-d support (Score:3)

    by AleT ( 51575 ) on Wednesday May 19, 1999 @06:14AM (#1887133)
    There is now.

    Go back to http://glide.xxedgexx.com/status.html [xxedgexx.com], the Banshee/V3 glide libs were released on May 16th.

    At the moment it is fullscreen only, i.e. no rendering into a window, but that is being worked on.

    If you compile Mesa, you get OpenGL support too, and then you can run Xscreensaver with all those GL hacks! :)

    Ale.
  • SMP functionality for quake iii:arena was alluded
    to over a year ago. you may want to look at the
    may 19, 1999 update at

    http://www.scs.ryerson.ca/~h2jang/trinity.html

    for further details. and, yes, Carmack did
    later mention some disappointment about the
    "marginal" improvment of an n-processor
    configuration over a single processor machine. but that was many months ago ... earlier in his research.

    =-hin->

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