He also seems to be in bed with Intel. His engines always run better on
nonAMD systems.

Because SSE is mysteriously disabled in Q3 engined games when run on
AMD CPU's.

Exactly. To be fair, the SSE-enabled AthlonXP did not exist when Q3 was
first programmed, and you can't blame Carmack for not wishing to revisit old
code.

There's a good chance he used a no doubt convenient Intel compiler
instruction that tests for the presence of an Intel cpu, rather than
actually test for SSE itself.

rms