I will all explain : I have an ati 9500 pro, 728 mo ddr and a athlon XP 1800+. My FPS are currantly around 40 whitch is very playable. But somethimes on some parts of maps when I’m fighting I can be under 20…whitch is not very playable 
When I change my game settings, I don’t see any diference in the FPS.
So my final question is : Is someone have the same FPS than in RTCW ? (I had 90 very often an never under 50) How ? 
PS: sorry for my poor english 
I get marginally less FPS in E.T. compared to RTCW. However I get more than you with a lower spec PC, XP1800 + 256DDR + GF3Ti200. (I’m getting anything from 40 - 120 (at which I’ve capped FPS)), with the average somewhere in between I guess.
Have you got the latest drivers for your vid card? Which version of DirectX do you have installed? What resolution are you running at (mine is 1024*768).
Well the problem lies in your 9500 Pro. It’s not a bad card at all, but it’s not the 9700 Pro level you might have been expecting.
Try lowering your resolution a notch, or taking off lesser noticable details.
Oh, and remember that framerates are always lower in MP than in SP, especially noticable in OpenGL based games. The CPU has to put a lot of power into doing network calculations and the like, so there’s less of it there for rendering.
Just try and keep up to date with the latest Catalyst or Detonator drivers they sometimes add a few more noticable FPS onto games. Also, sacrificing details will make the FPS higher but at the loss of quality viewing, your choice in the end.
It could be worse, my computer is a couple years old now and I get up to about 60 fps it can drop down to below 10 for long periods of time which is definetly not very playable. The drop in frame rate doesn’t necessarily seem to depend on the ping or anything either. The game will just slow down.
There is my problem : I have windows XP, the latest catalyst drivers and when i change the resolution and details level, it’s pretty the same.
However thanks for your answers.
i get FPS 20-90 with my “piece o’ crap” computer…
usually it is around 35-50.
specs:
amd athlon 1ghz
geforce 2 mx400 64mb
and with all updates and directx 9
and i have graphics set to medium.
I’ve been able to raise my FPS from a rock-solid… 15fps on Railgun, looking from the Axis spawn down past the Rail Gun, up to a solid 45-50 on my Kyro2 video card, running at any resolution from 640x480 to 1280x960 save during a firefight, and I’m running on a dual-1.4Ghz machine, though I know SMP doesn’t help that much with anything RTCW-based. 
Anyways, try console settings, switching variables around and what-not. What did it for me, as stupid as this will sound to most of you, was this:
seta r_primitives “0”
seta cg_atmosphericEffects “0”
Yes, that’s it. I just canned multitexturing and primitives.
r_primitives raised my FPS to a solid 30-35, while cg_atmosphericEffects bumped it another good 30-40% on the Kyro2, so now unless I have a smoke grenade land on top of my head, it runs like a dream. Whereas before, I was lucky to get a slideshow. And yes, that last variable turns off the rain, so you do lose some of the nice atmosphere, but it seriously bumps FPS on lower-end video cards.
Amusingly, whatever math is used for the fogging, by itself, is a serious FPS-hog on my machine also. Turning it off when testing with a devmap (I.E. Cheats enabled) raised my FPS up to a dead-pegged refresh-rate-locked 85fps at 800x600. I’m still wondering why that is exactly, but I’m not complaining that harshy. I’ve got it running at least now.
I DO find it odd however, that the Radeon 9500 cards are having more of a problem running this game than GF3 cards, which by all rights they should be taking to the cleaners. As stupid as it sounds, anyone try renaming their executable to quake3.exe and see if suddenly their FPS goes up? =^.^=
I’m using a gf4 4600/128 but I have my fps capped at 74. And it pretty much stays there. In alot of extreme firefights and crowded areas, the lowest I got was maybe 30.
And I am running at a high resolution, wth all effects on and some extras. Sounds wired, but have you tried capping? My thinking is, if the card stops trying to do the max all the time, and focus on a constant “mid range” fps, its much smoother.
Not sure of the validity of this statement, but it works for me.
Radeon sucks. I’ve had two Radeon cards and they both had issues with all sorts of games. My GeForce on the other hand has been like a dream. I will never buy a Radeon again and judging by the countless probs Radeon users are getting here with Radeon’s latest offerings I believe my decision is the right one.
Not only can “fluctuating” FPS cause problems in gameplay, but the way the Quake3 engine works, some frame rates are better than others. The best values to cap at are: 43, 76 and 120. At these rates you can jump further and higher. Don’t ask me to explain why, it’s just the way the Quake3 engine predicts movement based on frame-rates.
You should cap your frame-rate at whichever of those 3 values you can reliably attain. To cap your frame-rate look for a line in etmain\etconfig.cfg that says seta com_maxfps “0”. If it exists change the 0 to whichever of those 3 numbers you can reliably attain. If it isn’t there just add it.
GeForce all the way! My Radeon was poor on my old machine, I swapped it with an old Voodoo Banshee and worked better! Unexpected but I got 150% improvement.
MMORTEL, your rig shld be fine. Your card is already so fast that adjusting settings wouldnt yeild a difference. It just has a low celing, which youve hit because your CPU clock and bus speed are starving that poor card for things to render
ATI 9500 is a fantastic card, but it also performs a little slower on q3 based games than g4 ti4200 for example. In newer games (engine wise) the 9500 tends to out perform the geforce cards. Drivers are a different issue.
What you really need to speed these games up is faster bus. I OCd my xp2100+ to xp2700+ speeds w/ 333 FSB and my old grfx card started flying. It no longer bogs down even during heaviest fighting in rain, snow or grass.
I have a g3 ti 500 that would bog down badly even in RTCW. Punchline is, most people will be better off upgrading cpu/mobo than the grfx card only. Most newer grfx cards scale w/ cpu speed.
well no complaints from my radeon 9700 pro… whips geforce no end… must admit if you dont use a rage 3d tweak you will be lucky to get the game to run… but iv owned 2 geforces before. i must say this radeon is far better than ppl make them out (crap drivers and stability) well mine is stable with high fps all the time. (also helps to have a good cpu adn memory )
Ive got a AMD 1.4 processor with 512 ram. My little ATI AIW7500 gets 70-120 FPS since I put a new 550 watt power supply in it.
before it would get 20-50 FPS.
ATI cards are great but they are power hungery!!!
50 to 70 FPS increase from a new power supply? Im sceptical … Ive also seen claims of FPS increases from putting more RAM in, it is very unlikey unless you have far too little RAM to begin with.
I did just read some posts in hardware forums that ATIs catalyst drivers arent optimised for most of todays games and that a rage tweak utility can bring you some increases in FPS.
Some of the things that might give you an FPS bump are: Tweaking screen res and grfx details settings, updating grfx drivers, updating mobo drivers (such as via 4in1 or nforce divers) and possibly updating your BIOS (possibly), updating sound card drivers and lowering the sound quality (ET has 3 settings)
If you have sound quality all the way up, and your sound card is older / crappy integrated sound, it will offload the work onto the CPU and decrease FPS. Newer sound drivers may help w/ that issue.
im getting a pretty solid 50-120 fps.
max fps set to “120”
1.3 ghz athlon
256 mb/ram
xp pro
gf2 gts 64 mb
i also run “hz refreshlock” refreshrate program that seems to help with the fps in et alot, it maxes my fps in counter-strike to a constant 100.try it!
“limit not, classify not, yet respect all…”
EnigmA
Watch out with the atmopheric effects, on some servers it’s a PB cvar violation. If you use it, pay attention to PB warnings when you connect to a server, and change it (or change servers) if you see a cvar violation.
that’s true. If PB wigs out just type /cg_atmosphericeffects 1
Anyway, I turned my sound quality from high to low and can’t hear the difference, so I would say definatly try that.