[roders]

How do I do this in Q3A, Alice, STV EF, Heavy Metal Fakk2 etc (I've tried editing the CFG files with no success I just get a crash or the game resets this setting to "0" (off).

Open the console by hitting the tilde button on you keyboard (below escape button) and put in /r_smp 1 in the console

[roders]

I've tried this (enabling in the console) as well as altering the Hunkmegs from 250 to 400, but I seem to get Zilcho performance improvement (this is just a guestimate, I've not done any timedemos or anything) I've (just, yipee!)got a DP800 with an Apple Nvidia Geforce 2MX and 768Megs of ram (although 256MB have just dissapeared I feel another post coming on...).
Is it my Graphics card thats holding me back?
I cant run at a resoloution any higher than 1024X768 because ALL my OSX games seem to crash (deffinetly all the Q3 engined ones) my monitor supports 1152X864 (games crash on start up @ this res) and 1280X1024 (I get out of scan range errors, even if I manualy change the screen res to 60Hz by pressing shift when I open STV EF, which is what my monitor supports at this resoloution.

[rampant]

The Quake 3 engine doens't support it, but Quake 3 does. It takes time and money to implement such a feature. Q3 is the only Q3 enging game that enables SMP support.

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by rampant:
<STRONG>The Quake 3 engine doens't support it, but Quake 3 does. It takes time and money to implement such a feature. Q3 is the only Q3 enging game that enables SMP support.</STRONG>

The q3 engine supports it directly, and most (if not all) of the Q3 engine games have SMP support now, but only under OS X. There is even a beta build of Alice on my iDisk (boliver) that adds SMP under OSX if you're brave.

Brad

[roders]

Cheers Brad, I'm brave!!!

[roders]

your the guy that works for Westlake yeah?
Re "Brave" = slightly stupid!
Keep up the good work, will these ever become official patches?
P.S do games see any boost under X from dual processors even if the apps themselves asrn't specifcaly coded to take advatage of SMP.
P.P.S I'm interesetd in learning to code, specificaly for games, what language should I start out learning, C++ etc?
P.P.P.S Guess I've got to watch the spelling errors if I want to learn to code (u should have seen this post before I editited it!)

[ 02-17-2002: Message edited by: roders ]

[erwagner]

I have tried quake3 under OSX and OS9 with r_smp set at both 0 and 1. I could see no more than a couple of fps differance. OSX still being way slower....

This is on a 533DP with GF3 and 1Gig

Is this what others find?

[timster]

This may be off base, and if someone knows better, feel free to correct me.

As far as I understand it, framerates can be limited on a game by one of two factors.

1. the CPU
2. the graphics card.

From what I've read, lower resolutions, such as 640x480.. the CPU becomes the bottleneck, and I would imagine that SMP would help out here.

At higher resolutions, depending on how powerful your graphics card is, the CPU speed becomes less important and the bottleneck is the graphics card.

So it might be that you're running at a resolution where you're being limited by your graphics card, instead of the CPU. Try the game with minimal graphics and at 640x480, and then toggle the SMP support on and off and see if that makes a bigger difference. Do let us know.

-tim

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by roders:
<STRONG>P.S do games see any boost under X from dual processors even if the apps themselves asrn't specifcaly coded to take advatage of SMP.
P.P.S I'm interesetd in learning to code, specificaly for games, what language should I start out learning, C++ etc?
</STRONG>

Apps see some speed boost if they're not specifically dual-processor-aware, but it's not much. Some of the OSX and Carbon core will take advantage of it automatically.

As for starting to code, that really depends. Some people like to start in a real high-level language like RealBASIC then move to C, others like to start out in C. In the end, all roads lead to C++, but it's not really a great starting point IMHO. I started in Applesoft BASIC when I was in elementary school, did Pascal in high school, then went to C late in high school and college.

Brad

[roders]

Thanx for the heads up Brad, & sorry for the Wetlake mix up (Aspyr, oops!) I've tried the smp betas on your public iDisk,, the alice one crashes immediatley but the STV EF one works, I didn't notice any improvement in FPS on my G4 DP800 with Geforce MX 2 so I enabled smp in the console but this makes the game crash (and freezes my whole stsyetm i.e. I can't command Q or Ctrl Alt delet) after a short period (as it does with the offical 1.1.1 carbon patch) with looping /stuttering audio.
I'm going to get a Geforce 3 soon so hopefully will things improve then, but boy does OSX need some optimaization (seems to me like its running the highr levels of the OS, i.e. the old next stuff in emualtion with the Mach kernel/BSD is this why, amongst many other things why OSX is slower at doing one intensive task at a time?
P.S thanx for the juice on programming, when I was at school (a LONG time ago!) I got in to machine code and assemley language, I sort of understood it withpought effort but as soon as I discovered music beer girls etc i soon forgo all about it.

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by roders:
<STRONG>Thanx for the heads up Brad, & sorry for the Wetlake mix up (Aspyr, oops!)</STRONG>

I work for Westlake...but Wetlake is an interesting typo.

Brad