The preferences file for GalCiv2 has a bunch of cryptic settings. For instance, the Initialization section has "HyperthreadEnhancement", "ThreadedInitialLoading" and "ForceTextureUpdate" settings, set by default to 0, while the Sound section has "UserDefinedPlayList", "CurrPlayListDir", "CurrentPlayList" and "CurrPlayListPos", set respectively to "0", "PlayList", empty and "0". None of these settings are reflected in the in-game options window, and I can only guess what exactly does each one of them do, if at all.
I'm particularly interested in the HyperthreadEnhancement option, because both my computers make use of Hyper-Threading (laptop's Core i5-1135G7) or its AMD equivalent (desktop's Ryzen 5 5600G). However, I'm worried that the option is designed for single-core Pentium 4's with Hyper-Threading which were common in mid-2000s instead of modern multi-core processors (respectively 4C/8T and 6C/8T in my case).
Except... already in 2005 there used to be a processor called "Pentium Extreme Edition", which had two physical cores with Hyper-Threading support, for a total of four logical cores, seemingly the best pairing (at the time) for a multithreaded game such as GalCiv2. But my processors have more physical and even more logical cores... 4C/8T desktop processors only became a thing in late 2008 (Core i7-920), and 6C/12T only in 2010 (Core i7-970). Though, the last official update to GalCiv2 was released in 2015.
Still, my i5-1135G7 is much more powerful compared to CPUs that were available at GalCiv2's launch, so performance gains from activating HyperthreadEnhancement could end up being insignificant. Nonetheless I'm curious to see how future-proof the almost 20 years old game's engine is.
