John Carmack heeft z'n .plan geupdate met info over SMP support in Quake3. Zo te zien begint dat aardig te lukken:
The SMP support is solid enough to play with now. The only feature that is still broken is light flares.As a happy consequence, some of the cleanup work I did for SMP gave a couple percent speedup even when running without the separate thread.
On my development system, a dual 300 mhz intergraph realizm II, the low res timedemo scores went from 27.8 to 37.8 with "r_smp 1". This is only a 35% average speedup, but at some times (lots of dynamic lights in complex scenes) the speedup is 90%+. Gameplay is noticably smoother.
The rendering thread is almost always the blocking factor, so the faster the card and OpenGL driver, the larger the speedup will be.
This is explicitly a two thread producer / consumer, so there is no benefit to more than two processors. The app is well behaved, using sleeping syncronization so that you usually still have half a processor free for other operating system functions.
Hopefully we will be able to test with some fast consumer cards sometime soon.
Er staat nog veel meer spul in z'n .plan, dus als je geïnteresseerd bent mot je maar ff gaan kijken.
