when r_dynamic 1 is set, my fps drop under 100 when theres someone with quad, or the quad glow
is there any other settings which could effect this?

when its set to 0 it seems fine, but i really like the quad glowing, or the player glowing who has it.

ive only just recently comeback to quake, and i dont remember having this problem before

p4 2.9ghz 1gb ram, 512mb AGP ATi x1650

THANKS!

Sounds like a problem I had with modern ati drivers.

I had to revert to some relatively old ones, perhaps as far back as 2006, to get my dynamic lighting performance back up to par.

According to Spike, r_dynamic involves doing stuff that is simple not done in newer games anymore, which would explain why it's not optimized and thus slow. Perhaps someone could implement an effect similar to r_dynamic in a more modern way?

A more modern way is to use ARB_MULTITEXTURE and project the light onto the nearby surfaces (eg: q3).
By using a circular texture and two tmus you can use the texture coords to smoothly interpolate the light based on scaled+clamped vertex coord offsets passed as texture coords (like vertex lighting, but smooth due to interpolated tex coords instead of light levels).
Note that by doing this, bumpmapping and specular highlights are just a tweek away.

This does not solve lightstyle animations. Those are another kettle of fish entirely. Make sure you don't use lightstyle interpolation and you're generally okay. They're rarely used on DM maps.

Additionally, if lightmap are uploaded as BGRA instead of the standard RGBA, you'll notice slightly better performance.

I don't know much about ATI cards really. I've seen a few people moan about shoddy performance recently. I severely doubt that its due to just colour format.
I wonder what the effectiveness of uploading new lightstyles in a second thread would be.

Stev: thanks for the advice, i changed back to 6.12 drivers, and theres no problem, i wonder when the problem started?

for example, my FPS were dropping below 140 when looking at quad and moving the mouse in the map A2, now they dont drop from 231, which is what i have my cl_maxfps set at.

my fps only dropped when i moved mouse and looked at a quad glow. if i stood still they didnt drop

new ati drivers suck for quake. currently i am getting alot more FPS

If someone is willing to spend the time to track down the exact driver version where r_dynamic became slow, a detailed bug report could be sent to AMD/Ati, and we could get this fixed. I've had success with this before, albeit with a performance problem in another game - namely Knights of the Old Republic.