🚀 go-pugleaf

root@[127.0.0.1] (Ricket) wrote in <8F0F680ADLondonCalling@164.128.36.42>:
>grinch@home.com (Mr. Grinch) wrote in
><8F0EAFB6Agrinchhomecom@24.64.2.57>: 
>>- make better use of resources like ram
>How ?

I've got 256MB ram.  Win98 does not make efficient use of anything past 128MB, 
far as I can tell.  This means if I have several apps loaded, then try to run a 
game, Win98 will thrash.  If I am running a particularly big game, or, acting 
as both a client and server for a game, like any 3D shooter for example, there 
is a lot more disk thrashing under 98.  Under NT or Win2K it's not nearly as 
frequent. 

I should add that WinNT/Win2K run much better in those situations where you 
want a dedicated game server or server & client.

>>- Scalability also relates to computer life span.  If you can use more
>>ram and cpu's to improve performance, then upgrades will get you further
>>before you are forced to buy a new system.  For the cost of a dual-cpu
>>MB and an SMP capable OS, my original P2-400 system is now dual P2-400,
>>and I'll upgrade to dual P3-700 when those chips are at the end of their
>>cycle.  This will be several times faster (with SMP) than the original
>>system and should last me 3 years from the date I bought it.   Not bad
>>when you consider how fast computers become obsolete.  SMP systems also
>>make great, fast servers when it's no longer fast enough to be your main
>>system.
>
>Fine. That's if you already have a multiprocessor board.

Even without SMP, disk i/o is still faster, caching is faster, more memory can 
be used to load more apps concurrently.  So if there is a background 
application like an FTP server or napster or message service you want to keep 
running, you don't take the hit for it that you do under Win98.  At least 
that's my experience.

>Anyways, for games like flightsims do you really benefit from SMP ?
>I thought that the SMP implementation depended on whether you implemented
>multiple threads in your application.

To get the biggest improvement, you require either multiple threads or multiple 
independant ocurrances of the program.  For example, just about any 3D shooter 
with internet support can take advantage of SMP even though they were not 
written to use it.  You can start up the server process in dedicated mode on 
one CPU, and run your game on the other CPU.  Not to mention the other apps and  
operating system threads you run in the background.  

For example, even without running other apps in the background, just the OS, my 
pings are lower with SMP than without, under the same OS. While one CPU is 
handling the game, the other is handling the IP stack.

Also, some people are not content to just play games, they like to develop 
them, or make mods.  Most of the more popular image and 3d modeling apps 
support SMP.  They also will run faster under NT/Win2K when you have more than 
128MB ram.

Regardless, even if you don't have multiple cpus, things still run more 
smoothly under Win2K.  Most people familiar with Mac / Windows have no idea how 
smooth multitasking can be.  For example my old Amiga on a 7.14 mhz 6800 still 
ran the GUI smooth and responsive even with several tasks running and 100% cpu 
utilization.  Even under NT, the GUI suffers under 100% cpu utilization, but 
not nearly as bad as 9x.

>Does anyone know if any flightsims have a multi-thread implementation ?

There are SMP versions of SGIs "dog" OpenGL flight sim.  Others have taken the 
source code and made their own versions of it.  There are even Win32 ports.

You'll also find some multi-threaded Xwindows games under Linux, which you also 
might consider if you want to run games and do multitasking. 

One other thing I like about Win2K is the built-in support for Fat32.  It's 
easier to deal with than Fat32 for NT 4.  And it allows things like running 
defrag from within NT, which is much faster.  For example, I can defrag all 4 
hard drives, concurrently, under Win2K and Diskkeeper, and still do other stuff 
at the same time, and the defrags finish much faster. 

Now I will tell you Why _not_ Win2K for gaming.  Number one has got to be lack 
of full driver support.  For example, no real Win2K voodoo 2 driver.  The 
drivers that do exist for many video cards are not quite as fast.  This is not 
such a big deal for me, because  it's not the max speed I'm concerned about, 
but the lowest worst-case frame rate.  The drops in frame rate are not as often 
or as bad under NT/Win2K, in my view.    My other complaint is that the sound 
drivers under NT never performed well in games, as the sound was always a 
second after the event.  In Win2K this doesn't happen, but there still are some 
glitches, in my opinion, with sound cutting in or out a fraction too soon.  

Finally,there are the games compatibility with NT/Win2K.  Lucky for me, I 
mostly play Tribes, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 1/2/3, and some EverQuest.  So 
those all work under NT good enough for me to be competitive, and I'm pretty 
picky about frame rate and ping.  Right now I use Voodoo2 SLI or the ATI Xpert 
128 for games, but I'm hoping my next card will have some real driver support 
for OpenGL SMP acceleration.  This doesn't just apply to Q3 but many 3D 
modelling apps which run under OpenGL as well. From my experience, the cards in 
the game market with the best support for this right now are from nvidia.

Even so, games and drivers crash, and NT/Win2K handle application and driver 
crashes better than Win9x does.

One last thing about SMP.  A lot of people think it's too expensive.   I got my 
Tyan Tiger 100 for about 25% more than a regular motherboard.  At that time, it 
was the only MB at that price with 5 pci slots, which to me was worth it, 
because even if I never used the SMP, I used all of those PCI slots right off 
the start. 

Then, I got interested in setting up my own server now and then, for games, 
ftp, etc.   I always enjoyed downloading / decoding MP3s from newsgroups and 
other sources, not to mention game demos and stuff.  Even with a cable modem, 
these things can take a while, especially if the other site can't handle the 
users eager to get the demo.  So I started running NT and later Win2K more 
often, because things ran faster and more smoothly in the background.  After 
P2-400s dropped to dirt-cheap, I bought another, and saw an even bigger 
improvement in general NT/Win2K usage. 

The board will max out at dual P3-700.  I'll wait until July/August to do that, 
when they are at their lowest price.  For a few hundred more, the system will 
be up to or 4 times as fast as when I first bought it.  I feel I've been lucky, 
because for less than 1/4 the cost of a new system, I'll be able to make this 
system do what I need for about 3 years.   Ultimate gaming system?  No, for 
that you probably need to buy a new system each year. Right now that would be a 
1Ghz athlon or p3.   But when you don't have the $$ to keep up with that, an 
SMP system can be economical in comparison.    But even with out SMP, users of 
BX boards had some nice options open to them, with boards that could scale from 
300 to 800 mhz.  I don't see the next generation of motherboards having that 
wide a range any time soon... you'd need to scale from 1Ghz to over 2.5Ghz.