[Arryn]

Edi, from your perspective, I can readily see why you'd be delighted to get 30fps. One of my old PCs gathering dust downstairs (from 2 upgrade cycles and 7 years ago) has a 350MHz CPU, 512mb SDRAM, and the same video card. My IBM laptop (600MHz Celeron w/8mb video ram circa 5 years ago) isn't any better. I don't expect these machines to purr (much less roar). I'm quite happy that they run the game at all without choking and spitting up hairballs.

However, my recently-rebuilt desktop now sports a 3.5GHz-equivalent AMD CPU, 1Gb RAM, and a 128Mb ATI 9600XT video card. It's really sad to see 3D games that use pixel shading, light maps, textures, etc. (IOW, all the latest graphic bells and whistles) outperform a 2D sprite-based game that doesn't do all those per-pixel calcs. Given the game's 2D nature (foreground, not background, which is 3D), and my system's capabilities, I should be getting well over 100fps. 30fps is tolerable on the eyes, so I leave the detail at "normal" (I get about 10fps at the highest setting).

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not complaining much less advocating that IW do something drastic (and foolish) like maintain a parallel code base for the game using DirectX. All I'm saying is that the game's performance, graphically, is lacking. A simple statement of fact. Graphics aren't important enough in this game for the devs to take time away from other tweaks they could (and should) do, just so they can eke out a few more fps from their engine. But I would not be surprised if there's some rather inefficient code lurking somewhere that's causing the lackluster performance.