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Technology

Parallel Mesa 59

Posted by CmdrTaco from the aint-that-spiffy dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Some French students have started to code a parallel version of Mesa 3.0 (PMesa). They can reach a very good speedup (between 1.2 and 1.8). " SMP and OpenGL? Neato. That Mesa Quake thing is looking smoother all the time.
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Parallel Mesa More

Parallel Mesa

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  • Quake doesn't really do that much 2D, and glQuake does no 2D. Everything goes via the Voodoo, I don't think you even need a 2D card to play glquake under Linux. Not that I have actually played glquake under Linux, but there is no need for a 2D card, since the Voodoo card is directly connected to the monitor.
  • No, the output comes directly from the Voodoo 2 board. That's why you have a pass through video cable. No need for a 2D board except for for 2D graphics work. Of which there is none in glquake.
  • I've been thinking of building an SMP box, and parallel Mesa is sounds like another good reason... Anyone tried the SMP mod to celeron A's?
  • The Voodoo][ doesn't use X or svgalib, but rather Mesa (accessing Glide), or a Quake-specific GL miniport.
  • If it's a 3D-only Voodoo card, it completely takes over when active. The 2D card is completely uninvolved.

  • BeOS (Score:1)

    by gavinhall ( 33 )
    Posted by ArtB:

    I've run the BeOS GLteapot (software) demo on my Duel PII-450.

    With no other programs running BeOS's CPU monitor "pulse" reports one processor at 100% and the other at 0%. When I start another program, or even just move the mouse, the teapot load seems to jump back and forth between both cpu's.

    I'd assumed that this showed that the BeOS software renderer was single threaded.
  • I believe that 1.8x gain was with the hardware-accelerated version. (Voodoo2)

    If they want to work on paralell Mesa, let them do so, so it's ready when a manufacturer gets a clue and releases specs.
  • Sort of. I believe the V2 does have a bit of geometry setup assistance, but not much. The host CPU is still the limiting factor in most cases.
  • Um, Quake source is only available if you have a few hundred kilobucks to license the engine from id with. Doom source is out, but that's it.
  • See if you can duplicate that Microsoft!

    I don't see any reason why everything shouldn't be SMP nowdays.
  • It may be a bit spendy to have an SMP system *today*, but imagine how much money you could save on upgrades.

    You could fork out $700 for a pentium III, or you could plug another $80 Celeron 300a into your SMP board. (mine was only $100 more than a regular PII board)

    cat /proc/cpuinfo
    -- 600 bogomips thankyouverymuch.
  • 3Dfx/Mesa directly supported by X and the window manager.

    Rasterman? Are you listening?
  • (sorry about previous header, apparently hitting return after the subject posts the message!)

    Anyway, this can be easily demonstrated by linking the same program with Mesa or with OpenGL on an SGI Irix machine. If you then run them both: well yes, of course the hardware is faster, but try a program that uses something that the hardware does not do (on mine, any texture mapping) and you will see that Mesa's software emulation is MANY TIMES faster than SGI's.

    Perhaps SGI purposely maimed theirs to encourage people to buy more hardware, but I really suspect the reason is that the software writers there are not as good as the ones who work on Open Source.
  • Good. As soon as our 4x100 ethernet cards show up, I'll see how it performs on a Beowulf, probably will only take minor tweaking. Something tells me there'll still be a need for more bandwidth. =]
  • Hardware acceleration is still dependant
    on the cpu to feed it the data to display.

    Indeed for many accelerator cards the CPU
    not the card is the bottleneck as even
    the the fastest CPUs cant really supply
    enough data to max out a top end accelerator.

    Thus adding a second CPU to the mix can
    offer a massive speedup. I cant wait
    to get home and try this on the dual PII 400. :)
  • Le'Sigh...

    If only Mesa supported RivaTNT's... the graphics
    processors on those could probably do a good
    amount of graphics churning. :) Better yet, if
    all PCI/AGP slots in a system were RivaTNT's...
    heehee...

    RivaTnT Render farm? Nah...
    - Wing
    - Reap the fires of the soul.
    - Harvest the passion of life.
  • It runs at least as fast under linux as it does under win9*. I have a k6-233 and a 12mb voodoo2, and it uses svgalib, no X. Of course right now it's the only decent game I can run under linux, but the future looks bright!

  • BeOS (Score:1)

    by Orlando ( 12257 )
    Actually 3DFX support is planned for R4.1. See http://www.benews.com
  • Only if you are doing 2d graphics...like X. Quake does only 3d (basically)...which is why your voodoo (do you have even have one?) switches off your 2d card's output to the monitor when you play games through it.

    Likewise, you can have a dual-headed display. One card and monitor for regular 2d stuff like X, and a voodoo with a different monitor for 3d. In this setup...it should be obvious that the 2d card has no effect on the output of the second(3d) monitor. hence...you only need a 2d card to do 2d stuff...you don't need one for 3d voodoo.

    or something like that...sorry that was kinda long winded....i've been at work far too long...I'm going home.
  • Carmack had trouble trying to have one processor do opengl calls and the other processor do everything else... there was just too much overhead. What he said in his .plan was that he would just go back to natively threading it, because doing that he saw a fairly linear increase in performance. So, Q3, should have a threaded executable that will run faster on SMP machines, as well as a regular executable for UP machines.
  • I got an email back from Jon Taylor the man hired
    by Creative Labs to do the linux driver work.
    He told me that he'd like to see all cards
    supported but can't imagine Creative Labs will
    pay him to help out the competition, and fair
    'nuff I suppose.
  • Preparing code for SMP in this regard is basically ensuring that the apps are multithreaded. That doesn't cause any problems for you even when running on a machine with just one CPU, so thats still not a reason not to prepare the applications to make use of SMP where sensible.

    And the typical graphical web browser could certainly benefit from multithreading...

  • Hardware (Score:1)

    by teg ( 97890 )
    You really don't know what a Beowulf is or how you program it, do you?

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