[AssassyN]

So what games are available for OS X that actually use Dual Processors?

I believe Medal of Honor had a patch that allowed it to use Dual Procs...any other games? SoF II, Quake III, RtCW? Do any games natively recognize dual procs?

[a2daj]

RtCW does not have explicit SMP support. Quake 3, JK II MP, SoF II MP, MoH and Spearhead (slight performance decrease), Giants, NASCAR 2002 and 2003, and I think Dungeon Siege. Those are the only ones I can think of off of the top of my head.

[AssassyN]

Whoa, SoF II Multiplayer supports SMP? Where'd you find this out?

[ambush]

Basically, any game with a high number of threads will take advantage of multiprocessing.

What you want is probably Altivec optimization...

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by a2daj:
RtCW does not have explicit SMP support. Quake 3, JK II MP, SoF II MP, MoH and Spearhead (slight performance decrease), Giants, NASCAR 2002 and 2003, and I think Dungeon Siege. Those are the only ones I can think of off of the top of my head.

You can add EverQuest to that list as well.

[joe]

Originally posted by ambush:
Basically, any game with a high number of threads will take advantage of multiprocessing.

Those will give a very moderate boost compared to games that are actually written and optimised for dual processor Macs (SMP enabled). In general, recent games tend to support SMP in Multiplayer mode moreso than single player mode There are exceptions. But if you're looking for flat out bragging rights then Quake3 is still the most SMP optimised game to date. Hopefully a more modern game will take the SMP crown from Quake3 sooner than later.....joe

[a2daj]

Originally posted by AssassyN:
Whoa, SoF II Multiplayer supports SMP? Where'd you find this out?

I tried it one day after one of the updates and it worked, but buggy. Sometimes models in the game get all messed up for a mement. So you might see a player turn into a corpse with the wrong texture running around shooting at people. Disabling SMP support fixes it, but there's definitely a framerate increase.

[a2daj]

Originally posted by joe:
Those will give a very moderate boost compared to games that are actually written and optimised for dual processor Macs (SMP enabled). In general, recent games tend to support SMP in Multiplayer mode moreso than single player mode There are exceptions. But if you're looking for flat out bragging rights then Quake3 is still the most SMP optimised game to date. Hopefully a more modern game will take the SMP crown from Quake3 sooner than later.....joe

More specifically, recent Quake 3 Engine games support SMP in MP mode. However, JKII MP with SMP enabled crashes on my dual proc system, but doesn't seem to crash on others.

Sometime, I'll test out one of the NASCAR games to see how much of an impact dual proc support has since the game is heavily multithreaded.

[Brad Oliver]

Originally posted by a2daj:
More specifically, recent Quake 3 Engine games support SMP in MP mode. However, JKII MP with SMP enabled crashes on my dual proc system, but doesn't seem to crash on others.

Can you email me ([email protected]) a crash log and an ASP report? I haven't heard of this before.

[mac freak]

Shadowbane does as well, but it's sort of a crap game.

[Graymalkin]

In Quake 3 engine games you can enable SMP mode in single player mode. Bring down the console (`) and type r_smp 1 from the main menu screen. You can also go to Users/user/Library/Application Support/Quake 3/baseq3 and edit the q3config.cfg file with your favorite text editor. Find the r_smp line, it is usually towards the bottom. Change the value from "0" to "1" and the game will always run in SMP enabled mode. This works with Quake 3, JK2, and Alice AFAIK.

[AssassyN]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
In Quake 3 engine games you can enable SMP mode in single player mode. Bring down the console (`) and type r_smp 1 from the main menu screen. You can also go to Users/user/Library/Application Support/Quake 3/baseq3 and edit the q3config.cfg file with your favorite text editor. Find the r_smp line, it is usually towards the bottom. Change the value from "0" to "1" and the game will always run in SMP enabled mode. This works with Quake 3, JK2, and Alice AFAIK.

Wow, very cool information!

I see a post above about enabling SMP in the multiplayer in SoF II...how do you go about doing this? I have it patched to the most recent version (1.3.2 AFAIK), but is there anything else I need to do? And in Quake III MP, does it automatically recognize the dual procs. and take advantage of them?

And also, I've noticed that after installing the Quake III patch to enable me to play it in OS X, the items (like weapons, ammo, Quad Damage, etc. found around the maps) aren't pictures of the items, instead, they're like 2D models of a box of shells, or a colored shape like a rocket, etc...how do I get the actual 3D forms of the weapons & items to show? Thanks!

[Vash]

AssassyN - The 2D Quake 3 item models is just an option in the game it self. I think it's under options --> Game Options. Called Display Simple Items if I remember right... Oh, and yea Quake 3 MP is the same as SP it fully uses the dual procs and is still one of the most optimized games, though UT2k3 does it pretty good as well.

[AssassyN]

Ahh gotcha! Thanks!