Quake 4 v1.1 Analysis

Released yesterday afternoon was the Quake 4 v1.1 point release patch. Among appending four new maps for professional game-play (Outpatient, Skeleton Crew, Mind the Gap, and Double Edged), there is also a new Forcemodel option as well as Brightskins. Some of the other minor items to appear in this new id Software Quake 4 patch is a fixed pure server system, new AddonPak downloading system, voice chat in multiplayer, smooth stair jumping, and a great deal of multiplayer specific fixes. Another major feature to come down the pipeline in Quake 4 v1.1 is Hyper-Threading Technology and dual-core support. However, this multi-threaded support is presently limited to the Windows version. Id Software has once again continued in their vow of Linux support with releasing same-day Linux binaries to compliment the Windows client. These multi-core capabilities can be toggled from the advanced settings menu, and in the Linux version, the option is dimmed. Seeking out any of these performance differences even without the SMP capabilities, we have just wrapped up running a set of tests that examine the performance abilities of this newly released patch. In addition, we compared the Quake 4 v1.1 patch against the two earlier candidates -- v1.0.5 and v1.0.6. Below is the dual-core system we used for these set of tests as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX.

As we have been doing since Quake 4 was launched last year, we continued to use our Purification Center time-demo for measuring the average frame-rate with each of these Quake 4 Linux x86 builds. Although the save-games from previous Quake 4 releases are compatible with v1.1, the recorded time-demos are not. Due to the this, we were forced to record our traditional Purification Center demo using the same portion of the map as well as same weapon set and routine. For the NVIDIA Linux drivers, we used the private 1.0-8751 Beta drivers to reflect what enthusiasts can expect to see from the game in the near future. The few in-game settings at which we tested the game were -- 800 x 600 - Low Quality, 800 x 600 - High Quality, 1024 x 768 - High Quality, 1280 x 1024 - Low Quality, 1280 x 1024 - High Quality, and 1280 x 1024 - Ultra Quality.