I dont think you would be happy with ww2ol with the low ram and the generations behind video card.
As for Hawk. I run it completely in ram with a gig, others do it with 768megs. Upping the megs reduced the HD hits when new textures were seen. It would not raise your steady state FPS which is controlled by your cpu, video card and settings.exe in ww2ol. Not knowing your systems specs, os and settings, i suspect your machine was midlevel, your settings to high, resolution to high, etc.
I ran a 1.3 amd with 512 megs and G4C 3 with the graphics turned down. Got good FPS and flew well with this rig. It does require some horsepower to fly, but ppl play with 400mhz CPUs as infantry and enjoy it...when you just post vague FPS quotes you don't convey any info. Your distaste for ww2ol comes thru. We could have worked you to the max fps on our boards but I don't think you ever posted, did you?
hardcase