Rh8, SMP, nvidia drivers not using smp?

[meth]

Ok, looked at the last thread, and posted a message in another board here.

It said to do the make menuconfig to enable the smp otpion, well it is, i boot to linux-smp

Linux x1-6-00-60-67-65-4e-bf 2.4.18-14smp #1 SMP Wed Sep 4 12:34:47 EDT 2002 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I dont think the drivers are using the dual cpus, the rh7.3 rpms are made for SMP or non, i dont notice the correct FPS in q3 like i do in windows when i enale SMP, im getting half what i did when smp was on in windows, approx 50, duals on, 100+ , so.. im lead to belive that smp isnt working correctly.

What can i do?

[bwkaz]

Enabling SMP does not double your frames per second.

Having two processors will help, but there will always be some overhead. There's no way around it. Your multiple threads (some of which are running on each processor) have to synchronize themselves somehow, and that involves waiting for each other to do something.

Edit: Oh, Windows. Well, that's a completely different OS... FPS numbers are, in general, not comparable, although... hmm...

[Andy Mecham]

SMP support is a function of your application, not the drivers. The difference between the SMP and UP packages that are available on the driver download page have to do with the kernel they were compiled against.

--andy

[meth]

I understand that it wont double the FPS, windows shows that it nearly does....

I play Quake3, with the new pointrelease it can use dual cpus with the command r_smp, r_smp 0 is off, r_smp1 is on...

I enabled AGP support, ganed a few FPS, or so i think, still didnt do what i see in windows tho.

So the next thing i tested was turning off and on SMP, did smp 0, ok fine, did 50-70fps, did smp 1, ok fine, did 50-70fps still, no gain.

By enabling it on windows it dose nearly double, linux it didnt do a thing.

Not sure, getting help in a few other places, hopefully someone here can help more. Thanks.


Edit:
I should expect to see even a slight gain should i not? Is there a better way to test, possibly with the q3 benchmark test? Ill find it and try, but please help, i dont want to go back to windows :)

[bwkaz]

A better way to test would be to run a multithreaded OpenGL program. Which, apparently, Quake 3 (or at least the Linux build) is not. Which doesn't surprise me, considering the large variance in threading implementations on different Linux installations -- even pthreads can be implemented quite differently depending on your glibc version, and the glibc add-ons (*cough* linuxthreads *cough*) that your distro maker installed, among other things.

Find a multithreaded OpenGL program (and believe me, it is hard to do this right, and hard to double your framerate when you can't make >1 request to the card at a time... and you can't), and see what improvement you get then.

[meth]

Q3 does support multiprocessers whith the new point relse, r_smp, just doesnt do anything, lol, still wrokin in it, thanks.