On Sun, 20 Feb 2000, Chris Sorisio wrote:
> A petition isn't going to help at this point; I'm sure Zoid is well aware
> that Linux users want SMP Quake3. As I understand from comments he's made
> in the past, SMP for Quake3 isn't so much needed within the executable
> itself as it is in the graphics subsystem -- the Mesa3D stuff.
Sort of, but not quite. Q3A does have special SMP support built into it -
afaik it runs all graphics-specific stuff in one thread, and everything
else (sound, game logic, bot AI, and maybe even high-level graphics tasks
like face culling) in another thread. What this means is that the drivers
don't have to do any SMP stuff themselves, but they _do_ have to be
thread-safe, so that programs like Quake3 can hit the hardware from
multiple threads without treading on itself.
As far as the G400 or Glide2x stuff goes, I seriously doubt that they're
thread-safe in the way needed. For both systems, you can only have a
single direct-rendering client at a time, and mutiple threads in a single
client are gonna barf just as hard as multiple, seperate clients. When
stuff shifts to the DRI, though, thread-safety should be possible.
BTW, this is all afaik - correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks
Leigh
>
> What would be good place to start? I'll dig around (answer might be in a
> FAQ somewhere) or e-mail id directly to ask about it..
>
> cs
>
> On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Leigh Thomas Dyer wrote:
>
> > The Linux build of Q3A doesn't have SMP support, so it won't work in SMP
> > mode. This goes for the retail release, and the new beta patchlevel.
> >
> > Does anyone else find this _really_ unfair? I'd have thought that the
> > biggest marked for an SMP-supporting game would be Linux - there's got to
> > be a lot of SMP boxes out there running Linux. Could we maybe start a
> > petition to bug Zoid into getting SMP working on Linux?
>
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