I have 1.4gig athlon, geforce2mx, 384DDR ram, win2k and I get 60-85fps, drops as low as 17 in fully smoking field..
I'd say framerates are no problem in 1.08 if I can play the game with the CHEAPEST videocard on the market at the moment.
R4M, you are clearly CPU limited, heck your CPU is already 2 years old. One year is the average lifespan of a CPU in game use. I also suspect you have some other problems in your setup, you should be getting better framerates with that system. I used to get better framerates with my old 667@901 celeron, and your 700 K7 should be faster than that.
I'd download the latest VIA 4in1 drivers if you use a via board (also make sure you use AMD AGP VxD driver if you have a board with AMD northbridge and VIA southbridge.)
If you run windoze98 and you have 512Mb of ram, you're wasting it. Upgrade to w2k and you'll see some improvement. You do NOT need 1 gig swap file. With 512Mb of ram you shouldn't need a swapfile at all!
Reduce your swap size because it slows down your system.