Conclusions
Going into this test we weren’t really expecting that much. Our aging Pentium 4 system would surely not yield any results that were truly impressive, perhaps a 5 FPS gain here and there at the most. Boy, were we wrong.

id Software, Infinity Ward, and Intel have produced pieces of software that are absolutely incredible additions to any dual-core gaming system. Every test that we ran showed off the tremendous advantages of enabling SMP for demanding games like CoD 2 and Quake 4. The patches produced an average performance increase of 15.2%; 17.5% in CoD 2 and 13.8% in Quake 4.

In addition to the results of the SMP patch, we also saw the effect of using Catalyst 5.11 (and later) drivers in OpenGL Quake 4. In our tests, we achieved a performance increase of 19.2% in Quake 4. This is an incredible number considering all we had to do to acheive it was update the video drivers.

Both patches were created in a collaboration with Intel, and as such they are only said to work on Intel dual core processors (Pentium-D, Extreme Edition 840 and 955) and Intel Hyper-Threading processors (Penitum 4, Exreme Edition). However, tests around the internet have shown that the patch also works on dual core AMD systems - and sometimes to a greater extent.

It should also be noted that these SMP patches will most likely work better with a real dual core processor than they do with Hyper-Threading. The Quake 4 1.0.5 patch could easily live up to its 25% increase on a similarly configured system running dual core, we are not saying that the claim is innacurate in all cases, just ours.

In light of these tests, we VERY STRONGLY recommend that anybody who has a modern dual core system should update their games to utilize the SMP ability of their computers. In addition, we see no reason for ATI users not to upgrade to Catalyst 5.11 or later. The performance increases in all cases are too good to be true, but they are.