Tweaked configs, overclocked components, special cooling, if you look at a hardcore gamers' computer, you will probably find one if not all of these things. Competitive gaming requires more than just great aim and genius tactics; it requires cutting edge performance from your PC. The aforementioned are but three of the countless ways gamers will try to squeeze that extra frame out of their setup. Some might call certain of these methods “unorthodox”, or just plain stupid, and indeed, a lot of the time they are. Now, imagine if you will, something you can do to your computer that will make it perform significantly better with virtually no risk involved. Sound too good to be true?

Start believing. In response to the release of computer components with substantial increases in performance potential, game manufacturers have begun to develop a means by which to utilize this dormant power to give the end user a better gaming experience. Such patches are nothing new in the gaming world, in fact, id’s Quake III was one of the first games to have an option for using multiple processors. This feature makes use of something called Symmetric Multiprocessing, or SMP.

Symmetric Multiprocessing
SMP has been around for just about as long as multi-processing itself, and of course originated on platforms with 2 physical processors in their own sockets on the motherboard. For a system to utilize SMP, the processors involved must be identical and share the same memory bank. The benefits of having a system with multiple processors were first recognized by mainstream computer users with the release of Intel’s Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading. Users noticed immediate and substantial increases in system responsiveness and overall performance when doing more than one thing at a time. As with seemingly all things in the computer world, with the enhanced performance of multiple-core processing came some problems as well. Certain applications that did not make use of multi-core technology had performance issues when used on capable machines. Intel actually developed a partial solution to this problem with the command that by now a lot of us know and love: /usepmtimer. The other issue with multiple-cores was that programs specifically coded to utilize SMP would be almost unusable on computers with a single core. Both of these problems are still present today.

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Table of Contents
The Patches
Test Setup
Quake 4 1.0.5 (5.10)
Quake 4 1.0.5 (5.11)
Call of Duty 2 1.01
Conclusions