Multithreading in new games

Before i begin with my question, i must say that i am a new user at this forum and thus i appologize if this question has already been answered somewhere else. I searched the forum for similar topics but found nothing that answered my question.
I have an old machine and i am looking forward to building and entirely new systrem based on the AMD Athlon64. My main reason for upgrading is the fact that my Athlon XP 2600+ with 9600 Pro cannot quite run the B2 the way i want it or the way my friends run them. Besides, the technology is some 3-4 years old and it is a good time to move on.
The real problem is weather or not i should invest in the new Athlon64 X2 processor. Now, i understand that hyperthreading and dual core processors help when you are running several programs at once, especaily in Windows XP which supports multiple threads. However, when you are playing B2, HL2 and other hardware demanding games, you are typically running no or little background processes. This leads me to my main question. Is B2 designed do take advantage of multiple thread or dual core processing, or would and X2 be an overkill?

 

Hi and welcome to MajorGeeks.

No game currently, and few applications, can take advantage of dual-core processors. (Or even Hyperthreading for that matter)

That will obviously change in the future, but it's hard to predict when.

Personally, I don't adopt any new technology until it matures, so I would wait before getting an X2 just yet.

You could always just upgrade the processor later to X2. (Unless AMD change the form factor, most motherboards currently available should support them)

 

I thought Quake 3 did?

 

It does to a limited extent. You have to enable the "r_smp 1" feature, which can be very buggy, and the performance gain is negligible if any.