small q3a tweaks to make the game faster

i forgot about this site...it could be usefull if you still don't know how to make your game faster...
the site is :
http://rocketland.planetquake.gamespy.com/haqsau/wickedq3.shtml

and you will find this:
"She Ain't Good Looking, But She's Fast
The first thing you have to accept is that all of Quake 3's pretty graphical bells and whistles come with a price. They cost you in frame rate, and they cost you in smoothness of play. It's important to understand that in Quake 3, unlike previous games, your frame rate is not tied to your network speed. You can run high frame rates without ping creep or packet loss. And since every frame is linearly interpolated with respect to the server "snapshots", higher frame rates give you a better picture of what is happening on the server. The sweet spot seems to be in the range of 40 to 60 fps. You need to be able to sustain 40 or more fps in order to get smooth performance and playability. More than 60 is gravy, but less than 40 is certain death. You will be able to verify this with your own scores, it's quite real.
I Can See Clearly Now
One of the most effective things you can do to improve the playability of Quake 3 is to turn off all unnecessary effects. Although it also improves frame rate, the primary reason for doing this is to improve visibility. In small, crowded maps, your view quickly gets filled with rocket smoke, blood spray, flying gibs, and plasma balls. Your biggest problem at this point is simply being able to see your enemy. Cleaning up the clutter from your screen can make a huge difference in your score.
Turn off the blood spray and the gibs - this makes a huge difference in crowded arenas. The only drawback is that with gibs turned off, a body that should have been gibbed will simply disappear instead. This may bother you if you aren't expecting it, but you will get used to it quickly enough.
Another big visibility improvement comes from removing unnecessary clutter from your HUD. The tweaks given below will turn off your gun display, simplify the icon display, and turn off some other unnecessary effects. Get used to playing without your gun displayed. You can tell which weapon you have selected by looking at the ammo icon in the lower left of your screen. This icon always corresponds to the weapon you are using. If you don't see an ammo icon there, you must be using the gauntlet.
One last visibility tweak, and this one tends to be controversial. Turn on vertex lighting. Some people may think this is a cheat, because it lights the whole level evenly, without shadows. I will simply point out that it is right there in the menu and available to everyone. It also compromises the appearance of the level, so it is a trade-off, and it is every player's right to decide whether they want to make that trade-off or not. Do you want to compete, or do you want to look at pretty pictures? Id put it in there for people who have slow video cards, but I am quite certain that they are aware of the fact that anybody can use this on-line, regardless of the speed of their machine. If they don't have a problem with it, why should anyone else? Try it, you'll be amazed at the difference it makes.
Get a Grip!
There are two "features" in Quake 3 that are used to help give you the visual sensation of movement. First, your viewing angle is tilted in whatever direction you are moving, in proportion to how fast you are going. This throws off your aim every time you change speed or direction. Secondly, while you are moving, your point of view and your viewing angle are varied cyclically to simulate typical human body movements. Obviously this also makes it difficult to aim. The five variables which control these motions are detailed in the console section of this article. Set them all to zero. Your sensation of movement will be reduced to the degree that you may not feel you are going as fast, but this is an illusion (actually the removal of an illusion ) ). The loss of this visual cue is easy to adjust to, and the improvement in the steadiness of your aim really makes it worthwhile.
Another effective way to improve your aim is to turn on mouse smoothing, a.k.a. mouse filtering. If you prefer to use a very low mouse sensitivity, you might not need this. However if you prefer a high mouse sensitivity, or if you have cranked up your mouse sampling rate, you should find mouse filtering to be very helpful. Try playing with and without, and see if you can tell the difference. This can be turned on in the Controls menu, or in the console.
Tweakage in Detail
Most of the tweaking you need to do can actually be done right from the menus. In fact, if you really don't want to read the whole article, you can get most of the benefit of these tweaks by doing two simple things. First, go to the Setup | System | Graphics menu, and click on Graphics Settings until it changes to the configuration labelled Fastest. Click on the Accept button on the lower right of the screen, then go to the Setup | System | Game Options menu and turn off any fancy graphical effects listed there. Now play the game. Pretty ugly, huh? There are better compromises that can be made. Keep reading.
The following tables show some optimal settings that you can make from the menus, using the logic I discussed above. There are also a few things that need to be done from the console, which will be shown in the tables that follow.
First, go to the Setup | Player menu. Pick a simple, easily visible model like Doom, Ranger, Grunt, or Visor. This is important because we are going to turn Force Player Models on. This will cause every player to be displayed on your monitor with the same model that you are using. This saves a lot of graphics memory and bandwidth. It also defeats the advantage that some people get by using models that are difficult to see (e.g. Orbb) or difficult to "read" (e.g. Anarki).
Next go to the Setup | System | Graphics menu. We are going to set up a custom configuration that minimizes graphics overhead while maintaining good visibility. Change your settings to be like the following (not all settings are shown, just the ones you need to change):
Setting Purpose
Video Mode: 640x480 or 800x600 More than 800x600 is too slow, less than 640x480 can be very choppy on some systems.
Color Depth: 16 Bit Force fastest color mode.
Fullscreen: On Playing in a window slows you down.
Lighting: Vertex BIG visibility improvement, some speed increase.
Geometric Detail: Medium High detail is too slow, low detail is not necessary on most systems.
Texture Detail: Medium (one notch back) Good speed increase with little visual effect.
Texture Quality: 16 Bit Again, force fastest mode.
Texture Filter: Bilinear Trilinear is slow and doesn't even look good on older video cards.
Be sure to click on the Accept button on the lower right or these changes will be discarded when you exit this screen.
Next, go to the Setup | System | Sound menu. Set Sound Quality to Low and make sure A3D is turned off. You won't hear much of a difference in playing, but it does reduce CPU and memory usage, resulting in smoother and faster frame rates.
If you haven't already done so, now is a good time to make sure you have the correct network settings. Go to the Setup | System | Network menu, and select the network speed option which is correct for your system. If you are using an analog modem, this is the only network setting you need to make, but if you have a broadband connection, there are more network settings that you will need to tweak. I'll return to that in the console section.
Now go to the Setup | System | Game Options menu. Again, the idea is to turn off unnecessary effects. Change your settings to the following:
Setting Purpose
Simple Items: Off Simple items are faster, but decrease visual recognition.
Marks on Walls: Off Speed improvement. You won't miss them.
Ejecting Brass: Off Same.
Dynamic Lights: Off Big speed improvement during heavy fighting.
Identify Target: On Useful during team games, doesn't cost much.
High Quality Sky: On If you turn this off you will lose the portal effects, which can be very important in some levels. Not worth it.
Sync Every Frame: On Improves control response. (Note: this is not v-sync.)
Force Player Models: On Saves memory and graphics bandwidth, keeps people from using "weenie" models/skins.
Draw Team Overlay: Upper Right Very important in team games, doesn't affect FFA.
Automatic Downloading: Off Download maps some other time!
Finally, there are a few settings that need to be done from the console. Pull down the Quake 3 console and type in the following commands:
Command Purpose
seta com_blood 0 Turns off blood spray
seta cg_gibs 0 Turns off gibs
seta cg_drawGun 0 Turns off gun display
seta cg_drawIcons 1 Make sure status icons are on
seta cg_draw3dIcons 0 Turn off 3D status icons
seta cg_draw2D 1 Turn on 2D icons
seta cg_shadows 0 Turn off shadows
seta cg_drawAttacker 0 Turn off display showing who just attacked you
seta cg_drawRewards 0 Turn off medal icons on HUD
seta r_detailtextures 0 Turn off close-up textures
seta cg_runpitch 0 No view pitch due to running
seta cg_runroll 0 No view tilt due to running
seta cg_bobup 0 No cyclic up and down view movement
seta cg_bobpitch 0 No cyclic back and forth view movement
seta cg_bobroll 0 No cyclic side to side view movement
seta m_filter 1 Smooth out mouse input
seta snaps xx See text below.
seta cl_maxpackets xx See text below.
About the network settings: you may be familiar with other multiplayer games which require the frame rate to be capped to prevent network problems like packet loss and ping creep. Quake 3 doesn't require this, because the frame rate is not tied to the network update rate. Instead it has separate variables which control the downstream and upstream network packet rates, independently of the frame rate. If you are playing on an analog modem, and have already set your connection speed in the menu as mentioned above, the default values of these variables are probably fine. If you have any sort of digital broadband connection though, you should try higher values for these variables.

The rate at which you receive updates from the server is controlled by the snaps variable. This represents the number of server snapshots requested per second, and has valid values of 10, 20, or 40. The default of 20 is intended for modem users. For broadband connections, try setting it to 40.
The cl_maxpackets variable represents the maximum rate (per second) at which you will send commands to the server. In plain terms, this limits now responsive the server can be to your actions on the client side. The default is 30, which again is intended for modem use. For broadband use you can set it higher. As a rough rule of thumb, whatever number you had to use for a frame rate cap in Quake II or the original release of Half-Life is the number you should use for cl_maxpackets. I use cable, and I have it set to 40. Higher values may be possible, but I haven't found it to be necessary.
Measuring Frame Rate
There are two ways to measure frame rate, and for best results you should use both. You can set up your HUD to display your frame rate in real time, and you can also use the demo that comes with Quake 3 to measure your average frame rate.
To get a real time display of your frame rate you use the cg_drawFPS variable. If you set this to '1' you will see your frame rate displayed in the upper right corner of the screen while playing. The handiest way to use this is to set up a key to turn it on or off. For example, the following console command will allow you to use the F12 key to turn the frame rate display on or off:
bind F12 toggle cg_drawFPS
Actually, I leave it on all the time. There are some moves, like rocket jumps or strafe jumps, which simply aren't going to work as well if your frame rate is too low. If you know your current real time FPS, you will know whether you can get away with these moves or not.
Your real time frame rate isn't as useful for comparing different game configurations. For that you need a repeatable way of measuring your average frame rate during play. Quake 3 includes a multiplayer demo which can be used to get a pretty good measurement of this. Follow these steps:
Start Quake 3.
Pull down the console with the tilde '~' key.
type the following two commands into the console:
timedemo 1
demo demo001 for version 1.17 or less
- or -
demo demo127 for version 1.27
When the demo finishes, pull down the console again to see the results.
For the most consistent and accurate results, you should repeat the demo several times. The first one or two runs are usually interrupted by disk access. Repeat the demo until you get a repeatable, high frame rate, with no interruptions. Write down only the best frame rate you get; the average is meaningless.
You should also try running this with the real time frame rate display on. Watch this display while the demo is playing to get an idea of what your worst frame rate is. Pay particular attention during the heavy fighting around the rocket launcher in the latter part of the demo. If your frame rate here is below 30, you might want to do some more tweaking. If it's below 20, you really badly need to do some more tweaking.
When I first installed Quake 3 on my system, I used the default settings, but with the resolution increased to 800x600x16. With these settings my average frame rate was around 24 fps, and the worst was below 20. After considerable tweaking, I have been able to get the timedemo score as high as 100 fps. With the configuration I am currently using the timedemo clocks in at about 64 fps. During actual play the frame rate rarely goes below 30, and never goes below 20. This is actually better than I am getting in Quake 2, Half-Life, or Unreal Tournament, which just shows you how flexible and tweakable the Quake 3 engine really is. (If you're curious, this is on a 500 mhz Celeron with 128 meg of RAM and a TnT card.)
Wrapping Up
The bottom line is pretty simple: tweak for high frame rate and high visibility. Quake 3 is very tweak-friendly, and most of the tweaking you need to do can be done from the menus. Make sure you test everything thoroughly. Run a frame rate test, and then try playing against the bots. Once you've got everything working right, get on-line and kick some ass! "

it's not a big deal, but i think it is good to start....
scroll, scroll, scroll

2 much 2 read lol