Hidden surface removal?

[stargatenow]

I have Athlon XP 1700+, GF4 TI4200 8x@4x, 640MB PC133 SDRAM, Abit KT7A-RAID (Via KT133A) mobo...

Something is bugging me in Battlefield 1942: fps I get are not very good, going down below 30 in heavy battle (but not sound related) and one weird thing is that if I stand directly in front of some wall (seeing only that wall) and facing in the direction of the action my fps drop hard. WTF? 40fps looking at the wall? If I look at the ground at the same place I get 100+fps.
Any ideas what's wrong? Using Windows XP with 44.03 drivers (tried older ones but same problem).

[Hanners]

That PC133 SDRAM is going to be holding back your system a fair bit. Battlefield 1942 is a fairly memory intensive game, so that might not be helping. Not sure exactly why your FPS would drop when you face the wall though...

[stargatenow]

Nah, I used to have Duron 700 & GF2 MX on the same system and BF worked better...

[Greg]

Not sure why you would get slowdowns on a ti4200 staring at a wall.... unless there was a burning car on the other side. The smoke and particle effects in games (BF1942 included) are often the most inefficiently computed and rendered effects. When you are unfortunate enough to get the screen full off particles, such as looking through thick smoke from inside a vehicle, you will be treated to a massive frame rate drop on absolutely any video card. Simply overdrawing the entire screen 100 times slows every card on the market. Note that there are many opportunities to reduce those problems if the developer chooses to spend the time optimizing.