Poor OpenGL Performance ATi Radeon 4600

[Dr Robotnik]

Well, I have a ATi Radeon 4600, which should not struggle at all at running BZFlag, but it does somehow. It runs all DirectX Applications fine. It only struggles with OpenGL. It is on a 3.6GHZ P4 HT, i900 Chipset with DDR2, Windows XP SP3, and some recent ATI Driver package.
After a while, the lag in OpenGL goes away, but it still stays at 30-40 frames a second with random framedrops on textured maps, which is insane for a card with a 700mhz clock speed and 1GB GDDR3. My network lag is constantly low at about 80ms with very low jitter. On plain default texture maps there is no lag, with 140 frame per second or higher.
Are the ATi OpenGL Drivers faulty? Or are there tweaks I must apply in the driver controls panel?

[blast]

Hmm, 30 to 40 FPS sounds terrible (even my Intel 855 with a 1.6GHz Pentium M can muster up more than that, at least at low resolutions). First thing to check would be that the "Energy Saver" option (under Options > Display Settings) is turned off - if this is on, it will limit your FPS to something like 30FPS by default.

If that's already off, then are you sure it's using 3D acceleration at all? Check what it shows for the OpenGL driver when you start the client. If it doesn't mention your card, then it's using software rendering. If it shows "GDI Generic" or something of that nature, make sure you're running the game in either 16 or 32 bit graphics (preferably 32 bit). You can verify that by going to Options > Display Settings > Change Video Format.

Updating to the most recent driver would be something to try in any case.

[Dr Robotnik]

Well, I updated to the newest driver, and it is much better. It now jumps from 50-150 at random.
At least its better than before