Avatar seriously slowing down frame rate

I just noticed an interesting thing yesterday. I was alone in De Haro, and found that i was getting FIVE times faster frame rate if my avatar was not visible on screen (in mouselook mode or by just moving the camera around). I went from around 9 fps to 50 fps (see system specs below).

Are the avatars too heavy, or is it something with my system? When you get mutlitple avatars on screen (like during the Game Show Quiz yesterday), things become extremely slow. First I thought this was simply lag, but maybe it's a display thing as well. Any ideas.

Ragnar

System. HP workstation, Win2k, P4 1.6ghz, GeForce2Quadro driver 6.14.01.4345, 1 gb RAM, DirectX 9.
Running in Full Screen mode 1024x768, with most lighting options on, except the filtering thing.

You will want to rol back to nvidia 41.09 drivers. Later drivers disable support for a couple of methods Sl used to use in drawing AVs. Now they have to use some new ones, which are built into later cards but -not- into Geforce/Quadro 2 cards. This means this calculation is beig done in software which really slows everything down.

Even after you roll back the most complicated things getting rendered are AVs so your computer wil always slow down some, just hopefully not by that much.