Help Finding Bottleneck

[CMangano]

Hi everyone. I need some ideas about what could be causing a bottleneck in my system. My system is:

Soyo K7V Dragon Plus! Mobo
AMD Athlon 1700+ XP @ 1650 (150 FSB)
32MB GeForce 2 GTS
256 DDR RAM
30 GB IBM 7200 Hard Drive
Plextor 16/10/40A CD-RW
SPI 400W Power Supply

My friend has a system that is:

Asus P3V
P3 866
512 PC133 SDRAM
64MB GeForce 2 Ultra
WD 30GB 7200 @ ATA100 Hard Drive
Plextor 16/10/40A CD-RW
Enlight 230W Power Supply

My friend and I have the same time demo for RTCW, and we have been comparing numbers. We run with all RTCW settings on max, with a resolution of 1280X1024 @ 32Bit. When I run the demo, I get about 34-35fps. My friend gets about 49-50 fps. Thinking that my video card was holding me back, we threw his vid card in my system and ran the demo again on my computer. This time I got 51-52fps. Although this is a big improvement, it is no better than what he gets with a much slower processor.

My friend did note that his demo seemed much smoother from start to finish, whereas my demo started really slow, then speed up as it went on. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Monaco]

Video card is the problem. It is not fast enough- both systems max out the video card to the same speed.

There is a lot of GF3 specific coding in RTCW also, that is keeping your scores down.

[Yodums]

The Ultra beats over the GTS over two generations sort of as there's Pro then GTS. And his machine is at least decent enough to give the video card also a little boost.

Yodums

[Monaco]

well, all those cards are GF2s, and are identical except for clock speeds.

Both the GTS and the Ultra are being driven to their maximum fillrate. The Ultra is a bit faster due to it's higher memory clock, but not by too much (try clocking your GTS higher! I got mine to 424:)).

Switch the cards, and as you found your AMD will push the Ultra just a leetle bit faster than the 866, but they are still maxed out.

Trade up to a GF3 or Radeon if you want to see some real speed gains. Maybe a reformat and reinstall of OS is in order?