anyone tried a dual cpu set up?

[g7pkf]

I have been lookin in the cuboard and found a dual PIII 600Mhz motherboard with 2 600Mhz cpu's and 512Mb ram.

Has anyone tried running this software on win xp with a dual cpu set up? I know spec says 1Ghz min but 2X600Mhz should ease the load. this will be the only app running.

Just asking before i go out and spend a load of dosh (maybe unneccesarliy)on a new mboard+cpu+memory.

[acheyne]

It probably wont help unless sub has done some serious multithreading.

Most applications you run do most of their processing in a single thread of execution. This means that they will only make use of a single CPU while running.

With GBPVR, if you dont have a capture card that's doing the MPEG encoding for you, it is possible that one CPU could be occupied encoding while the other is decoding, but I'm not certain of the thread model.

Andrew

[sub]

It probably wont help unless sub has done some serious multithreading.

Most of the directshow stuff is multi-thread, so you will get benefits out it. Each of the directshow components (splitter, video decoder, audio decoder, renderer etc) runs as its own thread, manipulating data and passing it on to the next downstream component for more processing.

In addition, the GB-PVR front end and recording service run as separate processes, so multiple CPUs reduce the risk of one starving the other of CPU.

I didnt want to answer the original poster's question though, because I'm not certain if his machine is fast enough or not...in terms of performance 2 x 600MHz CPU does not equal 1.2GHz of CPU. The recommended minimum CPU for GB-PVR is a PIII 1GHz or higher. I suspect he'd find it sluggish drawing the menus, but probably ok playing video.

[lonegeek]

Most of the directshow stuff is multi-thread, so you will get benefits out it. Each of the directshow components (splitter, video decoder, audio decoder, renderer etc) runs as its own thread, manipulating data and passing it on to the next downstream component for more processing.

In addition, the GB-PVR front end and recording service run as separate processes, so multiple CPUs reduce the risk of one starving the other of CPU.

I didnt want to answer the original poster's question though, because I'm not certain if his machine is fast enough or not...in terms of performance 2 x 600MHz CPU does not equal 1.2GHz of CPU. The recommended minimum CPU for GB-PVR is a PIII 1GHz or higher. I suspect he'd find it sluggish drawing the menus, but probably ok playing video.

Im running on a 800mhz celeron with 384mb of ram! and it runs decent...Although not sure how fast it could run a decent computer...

O...maybe one day this pc will become gbpvr...(The day when i get an iMac)

[sub]

Yeah, I know some people run it on an even slower machine than that...but its real ugly...I'm sticking to recommended minimum above.