Do ATI drivers make use of SMP?

loophole · Post by **loophole** » Wed Feb 02, 2005 11:46 pm

I've searched trhough the forums but I can't find an answer to this question that is recent: I found a post that said they're NOT optimised for SMP but the post was over a year old.

So, I thought I'd ask the question again:
Do ATI drivers make use (or are optimised for) SMP?

By this I simply mean: are they multi-threaded like nVidia's drivers?

Thanks,
loophole.

Post by **Derek** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 10:15 am

I'm sure ATI would make it clear if their drivers did support SMP as it's a good selling point. Don't take my word for it, but I don't think their drivers are SMP optimized.

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 1:05 pm

The game utilizing the driver would also have to be SMP optimised (multithreaded that is) to take advantage of a driver that could use more than one CPU. Games are usually not multithreaded...

loophole · Post by **loophole** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 12:06 am

I'm not sure if it's possible, but I was hoping that in the case where you were using a video card that couldn't do hardware FSAA the driver could do FSAA on one CPU and the normal operations it would do without running FSAA on the other CPU. In this way any game, even single-threaded would still benefit from SMP drivers.

I actually have no idea how SMP optimisation of drivers works though. This is just a little theory I cooked up

How does SMP optimisation of drivers actually work?

Thanks,
loophole.

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Mon Feb 07, 2005 1:27 am

A driver is just a piece of software built for a specific purpose (just like any other software). There is no real difference between writing a multithreaded driver than a multithreaded application. I guess what a multithreaded driver does depends on the software developer writing the driver and what he wants to accomplish.