I played last night, and logged off in frustration due to crappy frame rates.
System:
Athlon 2000XP
512m ram
FX5700LE 128m vid
I ordered an Athlon 64 3200+ 939 pin cpu, 1 gig CorsairXMS ram and a Gigabyte N-Force 3 motherboard. Cpu and ram should be here today, motherboard hasnt shipped yet.
With my old system the small maps arent to bad fps wise unless I get to a cat 4 or 5 furball. During prime time most of the frontline bases do have sizeable furballs. On the large maps it only takes 4 or 5 planes to drop my fps below 20.
I have tryed every combination of graphics settings in the game to increase performance. I currently run 800 x 600, 128 textures, preload textures to system ram, all sliders to the right, transitions, horizons, animated water, weapon and gv effects off. AA and AF are both off, vsync is on. It's just not possible to dumb the game down anymore.
If the new cpu etc doesnt help, I too will probably go elsewhere for my online fun.
I'm still baffled at how poorly my system runs a game with min specs of PIII 850, 64m vid and dx9 compatible sound.