[ILUG] quake3 & SMP ?

[Martin Donlon]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 04:05:13PM +0000, John P . Looney wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 03:29:48PM +0000, Stephen Shirley mentioned:
> > Yep. It gave me at least a 50% increase in fps. Quake3 is unusual in that
> > it is the only game on the market that is really written with smp in mind.
> > The main problem with smp is that the graphics card drivers often don't
> > support it. In windows anyway, only the nvidia chips from the tnt2 onwards
> > are smp compatible.
> 
>  With all Loki games, they are multithreaded. The game loop is in one
> thread, with audio, input events and network code in another. Though, the
> lads from Loki did say this is unlikely to get much more than a 10%
> speedup...
Yes, its quite common for audio to be placed in a seperate thread since
the most intensive part, the mixing, can be completely decoupled from
the game itself. However, moving input and networking to seperate
threads is a practice based on modular system design rather than any
performance benefit and it rarely makes any real sense since the input
and network is so heavily tied to the game loop. Threads themselves are
generally frowned upon in game design and are usually limited to the
well defined and tested systems like audio. Mainly because they are a
pain in the arse to debug. Plus I think a lot of programmers are scared
of asyncronous, or they just don't know what the hell they are doing
(which is obvious from a lot of code I've seen).

-- 
Martin
--
Bother! said Pooh, as the AIDS test came back positive.