Hi,

If there is not already, would it be possible to add SMP support to VO? This could be a great way to squeeze more performance out of VO, and I would venture to say that many of us probably own multi CPU machines, especially Mac players.

Thanks!

Hmm. I presume you mean make the game multi-threaded? That would be a rather big thing to do, and probably wouldn't have much of an effect since most of the game's CPU usage is for the graphics, and that can't be easily multi-threaded. There's no client-side AI to deal with, physics are minimal, etc.

I'll probably multi-thread the network stuff, but yeah, that won't have much SMP utilization.

Maybe we could run folding@home on the other CPU under an umbrella vendetta online user, just to make use of it in some way.

I already do that anyway. :-)

The reason I mention is because Quake 4 just came out with an SMP patch for the Mac which adds roughly 50% more FPS. It seems like a coming trend to add more cores to CPUs rather than more Mhz, so it might help in the long term. Some games just offload sound processing to the second CPU which helps a little.

Anyway.. just something to think about.

It is something we want to do for the long term, but it's a major overhaul. Andy wants to thread networking sometime soon, and I would like us to thread I/O (loading textures and things), but neither of those are big CPU loads. Making a truly MP-capable 3D/game engine is a big undertaking. Doom3 was written more recently than our engine (Doom3 being the basis for Quake4), and was written with multiprocessor utilization in mind.

In the long run, it is definitely something we want. We're well aware of the proliferation of multi-core CPUs, and we want to take advantage of whatever processing resources we can.