What are some suggestions for improving TF2 CPU performance

performanceteam-fortress-2

A TF2 performance question:
Do you guys have any ideas for how to improve TF2 performance?
I'm running on a native 1900×1200 monitor and find that the game is really CPU limited. I'm running on a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 CPU, which is pretty darn good for performance per http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/48 . Also have a new GTX 460 768 MB graphics card.

I find that in firefights with a lot of people (the number of people on the server makes a huge difference) my FPS will drop to 10-25 FPS for small but significant periods of time.

Things I've tried so far

  • Removing all unnecessary startup processes from Windows XP to see if performance would improve
  • Buying a new graphics card (a dumb decision, as soon after I realized the game was CPU
  • Decreasing the resolution of the game to 1600×1050 with "medium" detail for all the graphical options

None of this stuff seems to seriously help the situation. Do other people run into a similar situation here? I'm seriously thinking of buying another better processor, but its an expensive proposition as I pretty much would buy a completely new rig – CPU/ Mobo/Ram/ HDD, OS (Win 7) etc.

Any additional recommendations?

Best Answer

My first piece of advice would be to go into the video options and enable Multicore Processing. It's been my experience that this is disabled by default, and enabling it usually results in a performance boost. Despite being in the video settings, this is actually a CPU option.

My second piece of advice would be to make sure you have recent nVidia drivers installed.

Note: My system is a Core 2 Quad 6600 with an nVidia GT240 512MB GDDR5, so yours should outperform mine in anything that's not using a lot of CPU cores.