Anilrgowda

Question: I've had a bit of a google and different sources contradict each other.
What games are multithreaded?
In particular which, if any, of the following are: Battlefield 2142, Doom 3, Quake 4, civ 4
thanks

Anilrgowda

soln
There are a number of games that are able to take advantage of hyperthreading/dual core processors to improve performance but currently none that are specifically designed to use the technology. The reason behind this is simple business economics. Until the market place contains suffcient gamers with dual core/HT processing none of the big manufacturers are prepared to release a game which may have limited sales & they are certainly not prepared to develop two versions of the same game side-by-side when they can compromise and have games that perform better on dual core/HT because they are aware of the processor threads but will run fine on conventional processors.

For those with a long memory look at MMX graphics technology arriving via Intel, the same kind of compromise was adopted then, games would play better on MMX capable processors but would still play on non-MMX.

As gamers with cutting edge boxes we have to watch miserably as most games run on just one of the processing threads or worse get confused as clock timings on the dual processors confuse games that are unaware of what's happening and gradually grind to a halt.

Valve have already issued patches for HL2 Ep2
COD2 also has a performance boost since Activision released their multithreading patch

Dealing with your specific query:
BF2142 - patch released making the game multithread aware. Conflicting reports about how well it works.
Doom 3 - Uses the Quake 4 engine see below but no patch available yet - runs on a single thread and performance can actually be worse!
Quake 4 - patched to be multithread aware
Civ 4 - 1.61 patch makes game multithread aware