[stansdds]

My experience has been that online and offline play are very similar in performance. It could be a problem with the host computer or the host's internet connection speed and there will always be a pause when a player joins/respawns or when AI spawn. You can turn down your AA to 4x and turn off AF to get the most frame rates out of your graphics card. In the game ini file you can set water=2 and effects=0 or 1 to lessen the load a bit. Also, turn off the background processes running in Windows, I use FSAutoStart to eliminate processes. Also look at what programs are automatically updating. Automatic updates seem to know when I'm online and they all start updating just as I'm about to blow someone out of the sky. I turn off automatic updates.