On top of our
initial Quake 4 v1.2.1 SMP article, which shares some information with our investigation thus far for the Hyper-Threading and multi-core support, we have learned some new information today. On top of the finite performance, there appears to be some in-game issues with the SMP binary. When attempting to connect to a multiplayer server with the quake4smp binary, the game with v1.2.1 is known to produce a segmentation fault. This issue can be potentially fixed by using the
r_useSMP 0 command to disable the SMP feature, and then once connected to server it can be re-enabled. We have also received a report that when switching weapons when running the quake4smp binary, the game had froze. The problem had also persisted with the SMP version even after binding the process to a single processor -- which would eliminate the effect of Symmetric Multi-Processing. We still have yet to receive an official word from id Software on any SMP matters.