I've played BZtanks before too. Didn't like it too much, but the fps was really great.
I didn't like BZflag very much in the beginning, but then I found tournament arenas where all flags except the team flag were turned off, and no jumping either. That was lots of fun.
(Jumping tanks! Can you even imagine anything sillier than that?)
I can think of many things sillier the that, and, unfortunately, many of the m are related to politics.
Anyway, in v 1.64, I sometimes come upon bouts of really sucky fps, for no known reason. It'll go down to like 6, even when i'm just facing empty space. There weren't any other programs running at the time either. Anybody else have this happen to them?
I do, but as I use this machine as a server and it's also running BOINC I thought it might have been something taking CPU time... though looking at my CPU stats that does seem unlikely. BOINC runs "nice" and the server daemons barely register.
Around 25-30 on a Linux system with a 550MHz PIII in it. That's while rendering some pretty vertex-dense ship-interiors, too. The card's a basic 64MB PCI Nvidia card. The RAM is a mix-an-match of various scrap I've salvaged and some of it may not be even rated at the same speed as the rest!
The Ionics Mission corner in the ionic mission tends to hammer graphics rendering, a bit, for some reason. The Poerbook. with a 1.67GHz PPC and 1 Gig of RAM with a128 ATI graphics card, still leaves me with at least 60, on the Mac.
Sorry, given their locations, those may be not very useful stats, but those happen to be the places my pilots are, ATM, on both those machines, so I can only report what I can see. Both locations tend to hammer the graphics cards, a bit, and they're holding up well.
ati r9k, celeron 2.8GHz, 512Mb RAM, my FR drops to 4 when i get into a system with luminous sky invented with Ionics mission. Normally 30..50.