Conclusion

Biased or not, beta or no, there’s a lot to like about the latest patch for Quake 4, whether you have an Athlon 64 X2 or a dual-core/Hyper-Threaded Intel chip. The two architectures each pick up phenomenal performance gains.

Naturally, you’ll see the biggest difference at resolutions where you’re not bottlenecked by a graphics card. With our Radeon X1800 XT, the sweet spot seemed to be 1280x1024 on both platforms. Even 1600x1200 with 6xAA and 16xAF showed an appreciable difference, though. That’s pretty remarkable when you consider most processor debuts demonstrate very little improvement at 1600x1200. And that’s with all of the graphics goodies turned off, too.

If this is what we can expect from threaded game engines, than we’ll take more, please. And it just so happens that Activision has just followed up with a patch for Call of Duty 2 turning on the same functionality, also facilitated in part by Intel’s efforts to get games threaded. The move is interesting because, supposedly, Call of Duty 2 moves away from the Quake 3 engine used on the first Call of Duty game toward a proprietary rendering platform. If adding thread-awareness is palatable enough, who knows which existing games might get the feature next?

If Intel is going to be the one working with developers to get threading enabled in today’s popular games, then we applaud the company. After all, Intel’s Pentium processors aren’t the only ones to benefit. In fact, AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 gains significantly as well, maintaining a performance advantage over the Pentium 4 thanks to its efficient architecture. But if you have an older Hyper-Threaded chip and were accustomed to getting whipped by single-core Athlon 64s, these patches should be your equalizer. Go download them, and enjoy.