Performance....

[Chernaya Akula 0]

Hello all..

Someone have a

PIII1G

512 MB

Geforce3 Ti200 or ATI 8500 OEM

and a Sound Blaster Sound Board..

or something near than this config... could tell me how the OFP work... in performance and graphic quality..

Thanks a lot.. Guys..

[Mister Frag 0]

I've got

Dual PIII-800

512MB RAM

GeForce3 Ti200

Philips Acoustic Edge

Windows 2000

I'm running in 1600x1200x32 with great througput, between ~25 and ~60 frames per second. With FSAA turned on, I still get about ~40 FPS, but the difference in visual quality is minimal.

[eyes 0]

Bit off topic but I noticed you have a Dual PIII-800.

I take it you mean by this you have two processors working together. How does this affect overall performance (you must be running win2000 or XP as 9x doesn't suppot dual processing?) for home computing.

I thought for a program to utilise dual processing it had to be specially written to do so, so is there a difference for games - I can't imagine they're written for dual processing but then one processor could take care of the os and one could do nothing but run the game.

[Mister Frag 0]

Yes, I have a Gigabyte GA-6BXD motherboard with two Pentium III 800MHz Slot 1 processors. I'm using Windows 2000 SP2.

Programs do NOT have to be specifically written for SMP systems in order to benefit from additional processors.

At the most basic level, any program that has more than one thread (an independent path of execution within the same process) will benefit, because the threads can execute in parallel, provided they don't wait on each other for results.

A seemingly very long time ago, I had a dual-boot setup with Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Any game that was compatible with Windows 2000 ran much better on it when compared to Windows 98, because of the additional processing power.

This was especially obvious when using Battlecom for voice communications in Rogue Spear/Urban Operations, because both the game and Battlecom were quite the CPU hogs. With a dual-processor system, it was very smooth, and under Windows 98, it was almost unusable.

[eyes 0]

That's interesting 'cos although I can see the speed gain you are going to get through running parrallel threads on seperate processors (I can do this on the undergraduate cluster at my uni which has several 800mghz or possibly even 1ghz proccesors) you won't really get the full performance increase that you could.

This is demonstrated by the fact that you got a greater performance increase when running two programs (the voice com and game) 'cos both threads are demanding whereas normally I'm guessing one processor will be used to full capacity running the main program thread and the second will running other less intensive side threads.

Did you have to go to any special effort or cost to get a dual processor as I haven't seen any advertised for domestic use.

Side not: am I the only one not getting email notification any more?

[Mister Frag 0]

I think you may have misunderstood. I was saying that the RS/UO + Battlecom setup worked much better under Windows 2000 because there was a second processor, allowing the load to be shared. This has nothing to do with the programs not being multi-threaded or not SMP-aware.

Yes, if you have one CPU-bound program that is single-threaded, you are likely to see very little if any performance increase. But the OS, services, background apps etc. can still be off-loaded to another processor, essentially giving 100% of one CPUs computing power to the CPU-hogging application.

Regarding the issue of where to get a SMP system, I built my own using a motherboard I ordered on the Internet. I then ordered a second processor to match the speed and stepping of the one from my existing single-CPU system, and moved both of them to the new motherboard. I kept my old hard-drive with Windows 98, which of course didn't recognize the second CPU, and installed Windows NT 4.0 in a second partition. When it came out, I upgraded NT to Windows 2000 Professional, and started playing games under it instead of Windows 98.

However, companies like Dell and others sell SMP systems as well, as do many small system builders. Check out 2CPU.com for more information on SMP systems.

[Unl33t 0]

I have

PIII 1ghz

256ram

Geforce2gts

Soundblaster PCI 128

I get from 14-50FPS

In 1024x768x32

Winblows XP Professional using the latest drivers for my hardware.

[AD 0]

I have

Piii 1ghz@1125

512 mb ram

gf2 64mb pro

hercules fortissimo II

Win XP home

Get steady 30-40 fps at 1280*960*32

[eyes 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Mister Frag: Yes, if you have one CPU-bound program that is single-threaded, you are likely to see very little if any performance increase. But the OS, services, background apps etc. can still be off-loaded to another processor, essentially giving 100% of one CPUs computing power to the CPU-hogging application.

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Sorry that's pretty much what I was trying to say I just didn't manage to say so very coherantly as I haven't got much sleep lately (too much work to do, in  the last three weeks I've designed and created a database in sql, written a filesystem and am currently writing a recursive descent parser ).

Anyway thanks for the info, dual processing is something I've been meaning to look into for some time but haven't got around to. Now I'm off to look at that website you linked.

[Mister Frag 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Quote: from eyes on 10:50 am on Dec. 12, 2001

<Snip>

...and am currently writing a recursive descent parser ).

<Snip>

<span id='postcolor'>

Try LEX/YACC or FLEX/BISON -- that could save you a lot of time.

[suchey 0]

My rigs specs are very similar:

Athlon Thunderbird o/c 1100

Soundblasater Live

GeForce 3 TI500

511mb Ram

OFP runs flawlessly for me...no slow down, no hiccups, all graphics options on, 1115x864 resolution or 1280x720 (still deciding which to stay with)

[Chernaya Akula 0]

How can I see the frames in my OFP??

[Mister Frag 0]

Download a copy of FRAPS.

I've had some issues getting the counter to show up, but found a work-around -- I usually have to switch screen resolutions at least once from the Video Options menu to get the FPS counter to appear. Other than that, it works great, and doesn't crash under Windows 2000/XP anymore.

[Hindhunter 1]

Suchey, you have an AMD @ 1100Mhz so I don´t think we should compare that to a PIII 1000Mhz since Athlons, end especially DDR´s, tend to be a lot faster =)

I´ve got a Thunderbird 1200 Mhz with 266Mhz FSB with 512 MB RAM (DDR) and it runs like #### together with the Geforce 2 GTS/PRO 64MB DDR on Windows ME and XP.

[Chernaya Akula 0]

I saw a test with the PIII1G and the Athlon 1G,, they have almost the same performance, with the Athlon being a little bit fastter some times...

[eyes 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Quote: from Mister Frag on 3:11 am on Dec. 12, 2001

Try LEX/YACC or FLEX/BISON -- that could save you a lot of time.

<span id='postcolor'>

I think that might consitute as cheating!

Its a piece of coursework for Uni.