Yes but when you get 200-300 fps constantly the game is much easier, you can move faster it seems and make tougher jumps that are flat out hard with lower fps. A fast config may make the game look ugly, but it seems even easier to see the enemy when it's uglified, as they said in the article.
Personally I think this thread has little bearing, most everyone has different configs, from the q3 config to your Nvidia OpenGL settings. Maybe some people have 16 bit textures, maybe some don't have on the anisotropic filtering enabled, it's hard to compare Q3 scores unless everyone just puts in on the default High Quality settings, then pumps it to 1024x768.
I like to run in 800x600 myself, even tho I have a 19" monitor and a GF2. I usually run my ugly config when I want to be competitive, but lately I've been using an ultra high quality config, but still in 800x600 to make it playable. Try these settings and then run some timedemos:
r_lodBias -2
r_subdivisions 1
r_lodCurveError 10000
r_ext_compress_textures 0 (to get rid of the crappy sky, not using S3TC has little to no effect with the 64 meg GF2's)