Respectfully, what I
believe is irrelevant. The
fact is, workstation-class cards are highly tuned for OpenGL rendering. And yes, not necessarily for frame rates but for image quality (although, when working with 3-D modeling you still want high frame rates so models can be viewed smoothly). What has changed on my system that is suddenly causing a bottleneck somewhere is what's bothering me. Everything in the technical numbers shows I should be getting better performance but I'm not:
1) Pentium dual-core @ 3.0Ghz upgraded to i5 quad-core @ 3.1Ghz; 3.3Ghz Turbo (faster processor, more cores)
2) Memory running at 1333Mhz @ 8-8-8-24 upgraded to 1600Mhz @ 9-9-9-24 XMP (more memory bandwidth)
And while the video card is still running at PCIe 2.0 speeds, a card upgrade should push that up to PCIe 3.0 (and its increase in bandwidth). My real concern is that even if I swap out my video card later for a gaming-optimized card this issue will persist. But why the sudden rendering bottleneck after the above changes is just bizzare - and only FSOpen is affected (other OpenGL games I tried work fine, but in fairness, they're not as complex as FSOpen).
Oh well, unless anyone else has a suggestion to try I'll just press on with GLSL disabled until I get a vid card upgrade in the future.