Usually when i play NS on steam i get like 60-80 fps just looking at a marine base with more then 6 buildings in. And around 30-40 in close combat with some enemies, no problems.

Then my friend tipped me about Omega drivers for nvidia cards that should keep same quality but better performance (a tweaking of nvidias 53.03 drivers right now). So i installed it and i had some better fps in games like thief 3 and Far Cry.

Then when i got in a NS server as usual i immedietly noticed that when looking from the far side of the room on our base the fps was lower then usual.
Wasent a big problem i thought. Then when the fighting started fps sank below 20 and it was much harder to shoot skulks that were on u biting...

As NS is the game i play most and the Omega drivers dident do THAT big change so i downloaded the newest nvidia drivers from their HP. (stupid me dident reset old drivers instead)
And as i tested with these drivers same crappy fps. So i got omega drivers back. And i got losses when playing as i usualy dont maybe just 1 or 2 sometimes. But now it is stuck on 3 and in combat 8 or higher. Tryed changing my rate (8mbit connection) 8000, 12000, 20k, 50k even 200k no diffrence.

Im on a 3.0ghz intel with 512 DDR and a GF 5200 card (overclocked, just thought of it maybe thats the problem) with vsync off and 85hz on the monitor.
I've recently defraged my drive both with XPs defrager and Diskeepers.

What could it be ? The overclocked card, the drivers, program slowing down, sumthing els?

Plz help I may have forgotten something i'll add it tomorrow if so

Use 29.42 WHQL Certs for old OpenGL games like Half-Life. Performance drops significantly with newer drivers, I have exactly the same issue.

Edit : Just looked closer, and you have an FX 5200. Thats not gonna run 29.42s, just go back to whatever drivers worked for you - do the usual NVidia dance of a clean driver install (Safe mode, change to PCI VGA drivers, reboot yada yada).

Edit 2 : Also, if you're generally frustrated with your computers performance or feel its underperforming significantly, make sure you throw all the trash out (no memory resident programms, check for viruses/spyware, defrag etc - make sure your hard disk is running in DMA mode and so on). If none of that helps with the generic underperforming, go into your BIOS, turn "ACPI Aware OS" to off, format/clean your drive and install a new windows.

But thats probably a bit more radical than what you were looking for

Edit 3 : Do yourself a favor and turn VSync ON. The FPS you do gain from Vsync off never have any positive impact on you anyway, and all you get from it is screen tearing and in rare cases even noticable performance hits (at least on my GF2 MX back in the day, VSync off would sodomize Tribes2s FPS for some reason or another).

Just in case you weren't totally clear on this, VSync stands for vertical sync - meaning synchronisation of the frames your card draws on the monitor and the monitors refresh rate. When you need it most - namely those times when you're dropping below ~40ish FPS, thats not doing you any good (cards drawing less frames than your monitors refresh rate). When you might make use of it (namely when you're staring at a wall getting 85+ FPS), theres no visual difference anyway. If your problem however is that you're running a 60Hz refresh rate, VSync off doesn't fix that - those extra frames aren't making your monitor refresh faster, and you still effectively a) have 60 FPS max b) are killing your poor little eyes.

Thank you so much! . DLing older drivers from nvidias HP i hope it works.

btw I'll try playing with vsync on and se how it feels thx for that 2!