Thanks for the response so far.
As Proxie said, check your temperatures, and computer for dust.
Make sure you have the latest Drivers.
How is your performance in other games?
I find myself cleaning out the tower every month, it seems, so that's taken care of. Temperature is something I've thought about and will look into when I get back from work today.
The last time I updated my graphics drivers the contrast went emo, so I'm still weary about that because I couldn't do a rollback. (This was during the end-phases of my Vista use (and was completely sick of it)).
Though this is a new OS so I'll do it.
Other games are also sub-par from what I recall (Half-Life ², DOOM³, even fucking DooM with the "bdoom" effect-enhancing WAD when things get stupid-busy (exclusive to TNT/Plutonia
), though GE:S stands out as being worse.
As for upgrading the card, I've been looking around for a few months now, but as I currently stand I'm moving to my neighboring city for schooling in the middle of August, and I of course need as many monies as possibly possible, so that unfortunately won't be an option for a while.
Try GE:S with the explosion particals off (Multiplayer > Advanced I believe).
Do note I am actually playing at fullscreen but in a window (because I use multimonitors it saves alt-tabbing out)
Here are my game launch options:
-novid -noborder -console -sw -w 1920 -h 1200
I'll give those a shot along with a look at the temperature.
Updated OP with native monitor resolution, 1920 x 1200, 16:10. (if it's relevant)