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Quake3 to go SMP

Posted by Hemos on 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." "

7 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. BeOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    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.

  2. Way cool... by YuppieScum · · Score: 3

    ...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?

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  3. Beowulf Cluster Support by EngrBohn · · Score: 3

    (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 that answers this and other questions.
    Christopher A. Bohn

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    cb
    Oooh! What does this button do!?
  4. This is a tad insane... by Psiren · · Score: 4

    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...

    1. Re:This is a tad insane... by Sloppy · · Score: 3

      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.

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    2. Re:This is a tad insane... by Beuser · · Score: 3

      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.

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      -just bein'
  5. Re:Now we need 3-d support by AleT · · Score: 3

    There is now.

    Go back to http://glide.xxedgexx.com/status.html, 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.