It was a mess, but finally got it to work. here was my situation...
GA-7ixe4 mobo, (now) ATI Radeon 7500 64meg AGP card, Athlon 850mhz,
768mb ram.
to make a VERY long story short, I had tried different AGP cards,
no luck, put in a bigger power supply, no go,
updated drivers like mad, nada...
lowered the clock speed on my mobo, WAMO! gta3 ran like mad,
perfect, so my 850 now runs at 750mhz, that mobo didnt like
8xx mhz proc's. im sure overclocking would work too, but dont have
the money to replace if anything frys or the cooling system (married with children)
But anyway, that fixed my problem, changing the clock speed.
another thing i noticed, not sure if its the card or what i did,
but RTCW plays much faster and its grafics are now out of this world.
it played decent before though, just much better now.