quake3 MacOS hackery, continued...

[Tim Angus]

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:50:21 -0500 David wrote:
> In this case, does "SMP" == "running rendering in a separate thread
> from  main processing thread"?  And if so, why wouldn't you want that
> as an  option?  Especially in this age of hyperthreading on Intel, and
> dual-core/-cpu boxes not far off from the mainstream, and the mac
> being a  huge multi-cpu platform...

Multi-threaded code is an order of magnitude harder to write and debug
than single-threaded code. Avoiding it altogether is preferable if
possible, and since in the general case for us it does not represent a
significant performace gain, it makes little sense to maintain it.

Disclaimer: I've run SMP boxes as my main development box for at least
the past 5 years and I see very little value to the SMP support in Q3.

As an aside, if you use OpenAL, you automatically get some parallelism
since it (necessarilly) runs in it's own thread. For software OpenAL,
this is potentially quite significant.