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Dual CPU And Game Support.

Antony52 · 2002-12-31T00:30:36

I have a dual PIII 1,26GHz PC.If we lets say add their speeds then we are talking about a 2,53GHz machine.However how many games if any support dual cpu.I have been told that the games are using a 15% from the second cpu only.When are we going to see dual cpu support?What programming technics are necessary for making a game support 2 cpu''s and more?

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Antony52 December 24, 2002 10:03 AM

14 comments, last by Antony52 21 years, 4 months ago

Anonymous

December 30, 2002 11:23 AM

quote:Original post by Evangelion
You can...

A)switch to Unix/Linux and use one of the dual chip kernels

B)siwtch to Apple Computers. This is what I did.

C)Beg MS to make software that doesn''t suck (like that''ll ever happen)

Windows is just not a good OS system. It has no support for featurs like true multithreading, and tends to crash 2x a day (even Windows XP/2000).

If you don''t like Microsoft and like to bullshit them, there are tons of forums for that. But give up spereading your shit here. You obviously don''t know anything about multithreaded programming. Get a life instead of spamming here.

NT based systems do support dual CPUs. But if you write a single threaded application you will not benefit for that. Also, just creating threads without knowing when threads are approprite won''t help you - neither on *nix nor Windows platforms.

tetsu

122

December 30, 2002 11:47 AM

quote:Original post by noVum

Please inform you before posting such bullshit
First of all Windows NT (thus 2000 and XP) HAS multiprocessor support and multithreading.

XP home edition do not have multiprocessor support.

--Samuel AnderssonOmnigames.se

Anonymous

December 30, 2002 12:03 PM

quote:
Mac OS 9 used non-preemptiv mutlithreading ("not true", and I think 9x is older.

Okay the troller was off base, but don''t forget to mention Mac OS X. Mac OS X has SMP with all the behind-the-scenes thread balancing goodness. Most people have bad ideas about Macs based off of 9 and prior releases. Things are different now. The Mac OS X version of Quake3 is actually multithreaded and takes advantage of SMP. I''ve seen a noticible different on my dual CPU machine, but my GF2 maxes out quickly so I''m unsure if it saturates both CPU''s.

thona

100

December 30, 2002 12:40 PM

quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
I''ve seen a noticible different on my dual CPU machine, but my GF2 maxes out quickly so I''m unsure if it saturates both CPU''s.

I would say no - not with Quake 3 and this graphics card. The logic behind quake does not eat too much CPU, unless you run the server for some other computers :-)

Regards

Thomas Tomiczek
THONA Consulting Ltd.
(Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)

RegardsThomas TomiczekTHONA Consulting Ltd.(Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)

LostLogic

151

December 30, 2002 05:01 PM

As long as you are running a SMP enabled OS then all you have to do is use threads effectively in your application. (For Windows that would be 2000 server/advanced server, XP professional, and NT.)

Now, the problem with games is that multithreading rarely gives you much of a speed increase. There just isn''t a ton of room for it. The best gain you will see is from overall system performance when playing a game. I like to play games in windowed mode so that I can do other things while waiting. Take for instance Asheron''s Call 2. It is a processor hog but with 2 processors I can easily read email, view game websites, etc. while waiting around for other players (maybe we are healing, traveling around, etc.)

As for only a %15 increase, that is not accurate. 3DSMAX and many other rendering packages can realize up to a 45% decrease in rendering times when using multi-processor machines. My dual 1ghz processor box renders frames almost exactly twice as fast as my single 900mhz processor machines.

If you want more explanation of this, check out Tom''s Hardware Guide for his article on Hyperthreading. It talks about how threads help/hinder games etc.

Bottom Line: With 2 CPUs your system will generally run more smoothly than with 1. Just don''t expect to see 600 fps in Quake instead of 300. Personally, I always build dual processor machines for myself.

LostLogic
www.lostlogic.com
Author, Multiplayer Game Programming
Author, Strategy Game Programming with Direct X 9 (Not yet released)

LostLogicwww.GamerOutfit.comXBox 360 Community Games Reviews and NewsExisled - 2D/3D Shooter for XBox 360

NorthWoodsman

166

December 31, 2002 12:30 AM

In general, the only thing you have to do to enable SMP support on a compatible version of Windows (2000, XP Pro, .NET Server), is to write your program with multithreading. The nice thing is, the kernel will decide which threads execute on which processors (This can be overridden by a call to..I believe it''s SetProcessorMask(), but I could be wrong). The concerns with SMP are the same as with multithreading (using mutexes, critical sections to make sure memory isn''t written to by > 1 thread at the same time), etc...

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