Earlier this month we shared that as a Christmas present to gamers there would be an Enemy Territory: Quake Wars update that would put this first-person shooter at version 1.4. Due to a development delay, however, ET:QW v1.4 wasn't released in time for the holidays. We can now confirm though that this PC update is targeted for release this week and will include an updated Linux client/server in tandem.

As we shared in our initial Quake Wars v1.4 article, this update has new features such ET: Quake Wars TV, a basic training mode for new players, and a "hot servers" section. Since that article, however, the Linux client has picked up a threaded renderer. This ET:QW threaded render is packaged as a separate binary (similar to Quake 4 having the quake4-smp binary) and depends upon a modified SDL library. While Quake Wars is already SMP friendly, the benefits of this threaded renderer will become noticeable on systems with more than two processing cores.

In addition to pushing out new Linux client and server builds, the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Linux demo will also be updated against the v1.4 release. If everything goes according to plan, id Software should be releasing these updates later this week. At Phoronix we'll be delivering quad-core benchmarks of the Quake Wars threaded renderer once this release is out. We have been testing a closed beta of ET:QW v1.4 for Linux with positive results thus far.