Quake III takes advantage of your dual setup?

I don't know - I do not have any single-CPU Tualatin setups.

Quake 3 is slightly multithreaded afaik.
It did help a bit on dual 400MHz celeron systems, but since the render thread is monothread, not sure it's possible to see a difference on 1400MHz monsters.

Could you experiment with r_smp and post results here? Could you also set the affinity to one CPU to and post the result? AFAIK, as sunaiac said - dual cpus helped at slower speeds.

I set the affinity to CPU 0 and there was no change in the reported frame rate.

I wasn't really intending to look at SMP with Quake III with this thread, but rather to see what frame rates people get with various combinations of motherboards and graphic cards while holding the CPU type fixed. It was a good exercise in that we can now eliminate that mode of uncertainty.

welcome to try my quake3 benchmark demo in this thread:
introducing my quake3 benchmark demo

Darn, I just dismantled my P3 1400s / GeForce2 Ultra setup. I think it was getting something like 120 fps. I can tell you exactly what my Rage Fury MAXX gets, though:

Asus TUSL2-C
Pentium III 1400s
Intel 815E
512 MB RAM
Windows 98SE

All settings maxed in Quake III Arena demo (demo1 / demo2):

800x600 16-bit: 60 / 57.4
800x600 32-bit: 55 / 52
1024x768 16-bit: 42.8 / 41.4
1024x768 32-bit: 38.3 / 36.9

Subjective performance is much worse, though. Quake III doesn't seem to like the MAXX's alternate frame rendering, and runs very jerky in dual chip mode.

Seems to be incredibly GPU bound. I got slightly faster framerates at 1024x768 (16bit) on my Voodoo 3 + Pentium III 500. Even my K6-III+ 550 produced similar framerates. You might want to take a look here:

P2/P3 VS K6-3+ - A Great Battle Commences

Could this be driver related? Or just Quake III not liking the MAXX?

F2bnp wrote:

Could this be driver related? Or just Quake III not liking the MAXX?

Dunno. It's a Quake III thing, though, not an OpenGL thing. Quake and Quake II run fine. Most games run surprisingly well, actually. I'll probably do some kind of write-up when I'm finished testing.

Here's my scores from 2001 using my Abit VP6. Still have the mobo gathering dust in my closet.
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26822.html
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26815.html

Looks like above 640x480 there was no benefit to using SMP with Quake 3. (at least with all the fancy graphics enabled)

F2bnp wrote:

Seems to be incredibly GPU bound. I got slightly faster framerates at 1024x768 (16bit) on my Voodoo 3 + Pentium III 500. Even my K6-III+ 550 produced similar framerates. You might want to take a look here:

P2/P3 VS K6-3+ - A Great Battle Commences

Could this be driver related? Or just Quake III not liking the MAXX?

i read it and i think most results are reasonable. however the lead of p2-400 over k6-3+550 should have been a bit larger, probably because the 3dfx drivers are more optimized for k6 cpus.

in my quake3 test, celeron300a oc 450 scored 9.6fps, while k6-3+550 scored 6.6fps, thats a 45% difference. both using a geforce2ultra.

quake3 does have a r_smp parameter and i have tried it on my core2duo rig. there is some performance boost(20-40%), however the game beomes rather unstable and prone to crashing. repeating a same demo test for multiple times also results in very inconsistant results.

anyway, carmack had said that quake3 was not really designed with smp support in mind.

DosFreak wrote:

Here's my scores from 2001 using my Abit VP6. Still have the mobo gathering dust in my closet. http://www.murc.ws/archive/index. […]
Show full quote

Here's my scores from 2001 using my Abit VP6. Still have the mobo gathering dust in my closet.
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26822.html
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26815.html

Looks like above 640x480 there was no benefit to using SMP with Quake 3. (at least with all the fancy graphics enabled)

Thanks. It seems with a fast CPU Quake III is mostly limited by the graphics card.

my newest results:
r_smp 0 r_smp 1
four ~880fps ~740fps
fake nv15demo 121fps 184fps

i have no idea how it exactly works, whatever you think.

DosFreak wrote:

Here's my scores from 2001 using my Abit VP6. Still have the mobo gathering dust in my closet. http://www.murc.ws/archive/index. […]
Show full quote

Here's my scores from 2001 using my Abit VP6. Still have the mobo gathering dust in my closet.
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26822.html
http://www.murc.ws/archive/index.php/t-26815.html

Looks like above 640x480 there was no benefit to using SMP with Quake 3. (at least with all the fancy graphics enabled)

You have to get that motherboard out and max out the CPU's. I have 1ghz Coppermines in mine and it flew with Windows 2K when I last booted it up.

I have a BP6 here, also, with dual 400mhz Celerons that I haven't had a chance to play around with yet.