5 year old game engine, and frames/sec occasionally in the 30s. How is this even possible?

[neilm]

No I would leave v-sync on, unless you want your gameplay to be really choppy.

 

[onelin]

Make sure you're not running any CPU cruncher clients that 'only use idle cycles' ... I've noticed that things like distributed.net interfered with my quake 3 FPS significantly (making them fluctuate when they should be locked at well over a hundred...) so I make sure those are off if I am FPS gaming.

 

[oLLie]

Originally posted by: onelin0
Make sure you're not running any CPU cruncher clients that 'only use idle cycles' ... I've noticed that things like distributed.net interfered with my quake 3 FPS significantly (making them fluctuate when they should be locked at well over a hundred...) so I make sure those are off if I am FPS gaming.

Thanks for the tip, but I'm not running any distributed computing software.

 

[PointlesS]

when I upgraded from regular hl to steam my fps were a bit worse too...before it was constant 85 fps in any situation...but now it dips to 40s and maybe 30s in intense scenes...hence the reason why the system requirements for steam were upped considerably...why I'm not sure...maybe to run valve's crappy anticheat software...

 

[BFG10K]

In the ATI Control Panel under the tab SMARTGART, the setting Fase Write is set to Off

It means that SmartGART has decided your system is unstable with it enabled. Your performance probably won't suffer much but it's still worth trying to configure your rigs to get the setting turned on because it means they're passing SmartGART's tests.

Start by installing the latest BIOS and chipset drivers for both systems and see if that helps.