I would like to know what makes the GeForce drivers so special that the Quake3 r_smp only works on those cards ? As i know, it won’t work on TNT2… Can you briefly explain the why and the why not ?
By the way, r_smp 1 seems to work with the latest RadeON driver (3100) released by ATI today. Nice to see that lazy second processor in use again 
What does r_smp do?
It enables the use of multiprocessors in Quake3.
Well, I’ve debugged this, and I came to the conclusion some time ago that it is a bug in Quake 3!
I can remove all rendering code from our driver and Quake 3 with r_smp 1 still hangs.
Not only that, but if I run Q3 with the MS SW OpenGL driver, that also hangs.
As far as I am concerned, I have pretty much conclusive evidence that Q3 is at fault here. You say Radeon works. I’m mystified.
- Matt
As usual my bad english made my day 
Sorry matt, but in reality i was asking why this feature was working only on a GeForce/GeForce2 and no other cards (works great on my associate’s GeForce, after he installed the Detonator3 drivers as they were released).
It works on the ATI only since the latest drivers, before it caused a crash/freeze.
Anyway it’s a cool feature giving about 50% frame rate increase. (40fps->60fps)
Also, some smp related code was fixed in the latest 1.27H quake3 release.
Sorry about the misunderstanding !
So the real question was “Why is it working on Detonator3+GeForce and no other card”.
I haven’t tried any newer patches than 1.17, they all seem to break things. Maybe 1.27 fixed the SMP bug in the game.
In that case, I don’t know.
- Matt
I found a trick in the GeForce FAQ to stabilize Q3A in smp mode …
Lauch quake3 with following command :
start /realtime quake3.exe +set r_smp 1
This runs rock steady on both GeForce and RadeON cards… no longer random lockups.
Now WHY must the process be launched with realtime priority ? Ask J.Carmack 