125 fps?

hema?

i have 300 fps constant on every map with:
athlon 4200+
gforce 7600gt
1,5 gb ram

x300 is a low-end card anyway

Agreed. The bottleneck is usually the speed of one's front side bus, which transfers information between the CPU and RAM, not the speed of the CPU. Especially with older Athlon XP-based systems.

A big part of ET's is so FSB-hungryness comes from the old Q3-engine's way of using BSP-trees as a basis for the maps: BSP-trees work well with relatively small, closed environments (traditional Quake maps, anyone?), but the calculations become very heavy in open areas.

Q3 maps are divided into convex spaces called leaves. Adjacent leaves are joined into clusters. The map file contains precomputed visibility information at the cluster level. During rendering, the engine first determines in which cluster the camera (ie. player) is in the map; then all the leaves visibile this particular cluster are selected and iterated through to determine which faces are potentially visible for the player. This requires a lot of data being transfered between CPU and RAM and is not hardware-assisted.

After the potentially visible faces have been determined, a z-buffer test and frustum clipping are still needed to generate the exactly visible set. This is where the GPU kicks in, and ET's polygonal complexity is not an issue for any modern cards. Or even for older ones, for that matter.

Anyway, back to the topic. I had an almost similar configuration as hoT with a Radeon 9800 Pro as a the 3D-card. With the CPU clocked to 2325 Mhz (12,5x186 MHz), I ran an old timedemo and got around 88 fps. Then I upgraded to Abit NF7-S rev 2.0 motherboard with some decent DDRs, and was able to run the same processor at 2280 MHz (10x228 Mhz). My timedemo result went up by 44 fps and I got 132 fps with the otherwise same setup.

With this result I'm able to play with 100 fps ingame, but not with 125 fps. Based on this, I'm betting hoT's limiting factor will also be the FSB speed, and he won't be able to play with a stable 125 fps either.

Here's the timedemo for those interested.

well, I had a strange problem: the lower my settings were, the lower the fps was, so I tried to set it all to max (excluding AA & AF) and funny, my fps got locked to 125. sure it sometimes go down to 120, but thats only on transitions between indoor and outdoor

and all that on 2500+ nonclocked

Read above, probably your FSB-speed, if you haven't manually adjusted it. By default, Sempron 3000+ has a 333 MHz FSB. ET really benefits from faster FSB.

We paly with default!1