How much faster does Quake 4 run on Intel-based Macs now that it has been made "Universal"?

For readers who may not be familiar with the details of the Quake games franchise, Quake 4 directly follows the sci-fi first person shooter of Quake II, compared to the third installment, which was a "multiperson arena" game.

Aspyr provides the plot of Quake 4:

You are Matthew Kane, a member of the elite Rhino Squad, which is leading the next wave of Earth's invasion. . .

During a deadly firefight, you are captured by the Strogg and taken to their "Stroggification" facilities. . . In a horrific and gruesome procedure, your body is cut and fused with metal, wires, and circuitry.

As the transformation is about to be completed with the activation of your brain implant, you are rescued by a squad of fellow Marines and returned to base. . . [The] modifications to your body allow you to manipulate and interface with the Strogg world in ways that no human has ever been able to before.

Realizing this new advantage, the Marines mount a massive offensive to shut down "The Nexus" (the Strogg Collective), and you are the key to accessing these previously impenetrable defenses and locations.

Quake 4 shipped on April 14, 2006 as a "Universal" binary, with "native" support for both PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs.

The more recent news is that Aspyr released a patch on May 8, 2006 that adds SMP (multi-processor) support to the game. Inside Mac Games reports that this should provide a "15-30% jump in performance" compared to the originally released version.

However, the always excellent Bare Feats went a step further, comparing the speed of Quake 4 with and without multiprocessor support enabled on the PowerPC-based Power Macintosh G5/2.0 DP and Intel-based iMac "Core Duo" 2.0 20" and MacBook Pro 2.0 15", all with dual or dual core processors.

The article provides a large number of benchmarks and should be read in its entirety, but the author concludes that:

The Intel Macs outperformed the [Power Macintosh] G5/2.0 with the Radeon X800 XT when Low and Medium settings were used. However, when we bumped things up to High quality with Shadows ON and SMP ON, they not only fell behind the G5 tower but they failed to benefit from SMP mode.

On the other hand, the G5 Power Mac (two processors running at the same 2GHz as the Intel Macs) with the ATI Radeon X800 XT saw a gain from having SMP enabled even at higher quality settings and higher resolutions (1440x900).

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