Listen, your framerate will drop because of one thing or another. It's inevitable. 50fps as a minimum framerate is great, as most people shoot for 60fps as an
average framerate.
Take a look at Anandtech's HL2 roundup, and you'll see that the X800XT is fast enough to push 60fps average in most games at even 1600x1200 4xAA. As you're stuck at 1024x768 due to your monitor, I'd just crank the AA to 6x and the AF to 16x and just enjoy the card. Your CPU is
most likely to be the bottleneck in HL2, especially at a relatively low res of 1024x768 with a video card designed for 1600x1200. If you don't have a Soundblaster Audigy in there to share some of the load, your framerates will take
a slightly greater hit.
There are many factors that limit performance, but it boils down to this with high-end components like yours. At lower resolutions--usually up to 1024x768--the CPU is holding things back, as most decent video cards can throw out more than enough rendered pixels to give you close to 60fps. At higher resolutions, and with AA, and with more intense graphical effects (HDR, bloom, pixel shaders in general), the bottleneck shifts to the video card, and the CPU begins to wait for the GPU to crank out 1600x1200 pixels with various levels of "shading" and sampling applied.
With your setup, I'd set every game (except maybe Doom 3) to 1024x768 with 6xAA and 16xAF, and max out the in-game settings. In the vast majority of cases, your CPU will be the "bottleneck," but a 3500+ A64 is fast enough that you won't be complaining. It's that simple. If you want 100fps all the time, that probably won't happen, as computers are multi-tasking machines and game developers code games, not mission-critical apps. You can maximize your chances of hitting 100fps by disabling AA and AF, tho I don't think it'd be worth trading that eye candy for a few fps more. (BTW, as I said, I'd max AA and AF in HL2, and switch to Reflect All. You can tone down the AA in CSS if you're more concerned with framerates than eye candy.)
CSS isn't just contingent on your system, tho. It's possible (heck, probable) that the server isn't updating the game at more than 50fps, especially when you've got a lot of other players on your screen that the server has to update you about, so your video card dipping down to that on occasion may not really cramp your AWPing more than Valve's questionable netcode (gg Valve
). I don't know how much bandwidth CSS servers require, but I'm guessing they don't send 100 updates a second to 20 people at once.
Are you worried about seeing 50fps because you actually feel the game get slower and it hurts your ability to deagle snipe someone from across the map, or just b/c you
think it's slow?
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