The SMP List

Post by **Derek** » Mon Sep 02, 2002 4:54 pm

What do you think of creating a list of all SMP capable Apps/Games?

I'll start:

Quake 3
3D Studio Max
Adobe Photoshop

dantheman · Post by **dantheman** » Tue Sep 03, 2002 10:06 am

Vidomi http://www.vidomi.com

dantheman · Post by **dantheman** » Mon Sep 09, 2002 4:22 pm

RPS-OT 3.0 alpha http://www.worldrps.com/trainer.html

hehe.

onelegdis · Post by **onelegdis** » Fri Oct 04, 2002 8:53 am

Exact Audio Copy (converts MP3's)

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Sun Oct 27, 2002 6:43 am

The DareDevil wrote:What do you think of creating a list of all SMP capable Apps/Games?

Quake 3

Great idea! I´d just like to add that all Quake3 engine games are at least not entirely stable when using smp. For Quake3 itself, I experienced that at least a client/listen server (not sure about a dedicated server) is actually _slower_ with smp enabled. I think I´ll benchmark it again with my current configuration and post the results.- RTCW was always crashing after a short time, MOHAA always crashing instantly after the first loading screen.

Best regards,

Wolfram

Post by **Derek** » Sun Oct 27, 2002 9:37 am

Wolfram wrote:
The DareDevil wrote:What do you think of creating a list of all SMP capable Apps/Games?

Quake 3
Great idea! I´d just like to add that all Quake3 engine games are at least not entirely stable when using smp. For Quake3 itself, I experienced that at least a client/listen server (not sure about a dedicated server) is actually _slower_ with smp enabled. I think I´ll benchmark it again with my current configuration and post the results.- RTCW was always crashing after a short time, MOHAA always crashing instantly after the first loading screen.

Best regards,

Wolfram

So, are you going to add to the list?

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Mon Oct 28, 2002 5:35 am

I just tried to benchmark Quake3... but it now crashes every time with r_smp set to 1

Aside from that:

Adobe Premiere (video editing)
Sonic Foundry Sound Forge (audio editing)
Maya (world editing)
Tribes1 (erm... enemy body editing?)

vgoraz · Post by **vgoraz** » Wed Oct 30, 2002 6:56 am

Most linux apps are smart enough to use both processors as they are mostly smp aware (assuming you have built your kernel to support it). Also almost all BeOS apps are smp capable and BeOS itself is silky smooth with dual processors. Its really worth buying BeOS (or waiting the agonizing long time for free beos to come out) just to see how cool it is and well it works with dual processors

Post by **Derek** » Sat Nov 23, 2002 11:21 pm

Game: Falcon 4

Post by **Derek** » Sat Nov 23, 2002 11:22 pm

SoftImage

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Wed Apr 30, 2003 12:51 pm

Here´s another two (or three?) audio editing suites:

Cubase VST 5
Cubase SX
Cakewalk Sonar

Cubase VST supports SMP in two modes (standard and advanced) since 5.0 r2. Its successor Cubase SX is also said to have SMP support, haven´t found detailed information about that yet. But there is a good comparison of Cubase SX and Cakewalk Sonar (which also supports SMP) here: http://www.twistedmotivations.com/computer/sonar_vs_sx/
According to that Sonar offers better SMP support.

iSDn · Post by **iSDn** » Sat Aug 07, 2004 7:04 am

Unreal Tournament 2003

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Thu Sep 30, 2004 2:29 pm

AFAIK UT 2004 does the sound in an extra thread. Not sure if this applies to UT 2003.

I'm not sure if it's really SMP capable, but I'd like to mention that

Acronis True Image 8

puts full load on both CPUs on my BP6 when it's doing a backup.

loophole · Post by **loophole** » Mon Jan 24, 2005 11:29 pm

www.2cpu.com used to have a huge database of programs that utilised SMP but I can't find it at the moment.

The xine movie player (I use it under Linux) is completely multi-threaded for SMP action.

loophole

phaedrus · Post by **phaedrus** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 1:36 am

I've had good luck with Q3A SMP under Linux.

Most programs under Linux are not actually multithreaded, but the OS is layered enough that it's still a smoother ride with SMP (ie, the kernel can run the XServer on one proc, and graphical programs on the other, it's smart enough to optimize like that. I find it to be nice and smooth). I would think that NT and XP are smart enough in this manner too, but I've never used either on a dual proc system.

If you've got a DVD player under Linux, I suggest Xine, it's the only one that lists multithreading as a feature (so I'm not sure if any of the others are threaded, but I would guess not). It runs smoothly with Celerons @366.

Jeff

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Tue Jan 25, 2005 3:41 am

Mplayer, the media player under Linux is also multithreaded and works wonders on the BP6. It utilizes less resources and is capable of running with more codecs than Xine. For the most part, Mplayer is used without a GUI but there is a GUI for it as well (activate it using "gmplayer"). If you want to run without a GUI then read the man page for information on how to control it via the keyboard. It works really well!

I actually run both Xine and Mplayer on my system but I use mplayer 80% of the time.

Post by **Derek** » Thu Jan 27, 2005 7:00 pm

purrkur wrote:Mplayer, the media player under Linux is also multithreaded and works wonders on the BP6. It utilizes less resources and is capable of running with more codecs than Xine. For the most part, Mplayer is used without a GUI but there is a GUI for it as well (activate it using "gmplayer"). If you want to run without a GUI then read the man page for information on how to control it via the keyboard. It works really well!

I actually run both Xine and Mplayer on my system but I use mplayer 80% of the time.

It is also good to know that Linux is indeed multithreaded

(http://www.bp6.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=2613)

phaedrus · Post by **phaedrus** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 11:57 pm

The Linux kernel has been SMP capable for a long time--since the 2.0.x kernels. 2.0.0 was released in 1996. I started running Linux with the 2.0.35 (1998) kernel.

IIRC, the thread architecture was completely redone for 2.4.x, and now uses a much more awesome multithreading scheme. Basically, the kernel was redone such that processes and threads were unified, and processes are now merely "heavy" threads. This is the scheme used in the Mach kernel (used by NeXT and now MacOSX) and Digital Unix (later Tru64, which HP is abandoning...).

I'm sketchy on the older multithreading scheme for Linux, but one of my favorite parts of the operating system is its stratification. User interaction is handled by a window manger/desktop environment, display is handled by the Xserver, tasks that need to run continually are split off into servers which run in the background (daemons), etc. The list of processes running right after boot on a fresh Linux system without Xwindows running is pretty long, but they're all light weight, and since 2.0, Linux has been able to schedule these on multiple processors for maximum performance. There is a noticeable difference jumping between a uniprocessor kernel and an SMP kernel (yes, I have both, the uniprocessor kernels are simpler and good to have around for nightmare scenarios).

However, what I really love about this is that all levels can be swapped out. There are many window managers (and at least 3 desktop environments that I know of), multiple Xservers (Xorg, XFree86, and XiG, but who why use anything but Xorg if you weren't silly and bought an ATI card?), and so on. Sounds like a lot of duplication, eh? It's not. For instance, I use WindowMaker as my windowmanager, because it's lightweight and it's pretty. It's barebones on desktop like features, but I don't care about those (I hate the mouse, unless I'm using it to rail some monkey in the chest

)

Linux has been SMP capable since 1996, and it got a big boost with 2.4.x (which is a super-stable kernel at this point, 2.6.x is just extra-stable

)

Jeff

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Fri Feb 04, 2005 2:44 am

phaedrus wrote:IIRC, the thread architecture was completely redone for 2.4.x, and now uses a much more awesome multithreading scheme.

Are you talking about NPTL? If so then that became mainstream in the 2.6 series. Redhat actually backported it into their own 2.4 kernels but that (in my opinion) turned out to be a real mess. However, NPTL under 2.6 rocks.

phaedrus wrote:However, what I really love about this is that all levels can be swapped out. There are many window managers (and at least 3 desktop environments that I know of), multiple Xservers (Xorg, XFree86, and XiG, but who why use anything but Xorg if you weren't silly and bought an ATI card?), and so on. Sounds like a lot of duplication, eh? It's not. For instance, I use WindowMaker as my windowmanager, because it's lightweight and it's pretty.

Yeah! I love choice! It is such a shame though that Windows users feel so threatened by it. On a day to day basis I will use KDE as my desktop, but for serious work, or slower computers I will drop into Fluxbox. The thing I love the most about Windowmaker are the dock apps! Good thing about Open Source is that the code is readily available so I don't have to actually use Windowmaker to get access to dock apps. They work fine under Fluxbox as well (and others).

Jordan · Post by **Jordan** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:08 pm

I'm gonna sound stupid saying this:

Windows NT based OS-s
Adobe Acrobat

I just had to comment about how much faster Windows XP works on 2 CPU's. Also, all of Adobe Acrobat loads super-fast. It's cool because Acrobat load WAY faster on my celeron 600 BP6 than it does on my Athlon 1300MHz system. ooh, paradox.

Oh ya, and it may not be SMP at all, but Unreal Tournament works well on dual CPU's for this reason: Assign a dedicated server to one CPU, then play on it with the other CPU! It's weird and fun!

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