need help with radeon 9800 pro

[kinada423]

I have a radeon 9800 pro and I am having difficulty getting acceptable framerates in the game. I know its not an issue of pc or drivers. I tried the newest omega drivers but it was having difficulty running some othe games with their newest set and the older version of their drivers suprising weren't giving out the rates of the ati drivers. I have the newest via hyperion driver installs, I have most recent ati drivers, most recent sound card drivers and my bios is up to the current release. I wanted some advice on how I could get the performance and visual quality to expect from the card I spent 400 dollars on. I get 40-50fps max inside with no battles etc. Large outdoor battles drop it down below 10fps and this is with all the setting on low at 1024x768 @16 bit color. All the control settings for the ati drivers are set to performance as well. My system specs are as follows:

athlon xp 2200+
kt400 chipset motherboard (soyo black dragon edition)
running at 8x agp with 128mb arpeture in bios
640 mb of micron pc2100 ram
hercules gametheater xp
the game is installed on a 40gb 7200rpm drive which is freshly defragged and runs a program in background to autoplace files to keep the freshly defragged feel (I have turned this off to check performance and results remained the same.)
radeon 9800pro 128mb version
Enermax 460w power supply (power obviously not an issue)
3.3mbps/256kbps Cable connection running through Router
My cpu temp runs steady idle around 34degrees celsius and around 38degrees at full load so proper cooling is not an issue.

Performance in other games is not an issue. Q3a runs maxxed out with fsaa cranked to 4x or higher with no issues as well as splinter cell, unreal2, army ops, half life medal of honor, motogp2, operation flashpoint, return to castle wolfenstien, and pre-gold (trial edition) of jedi knight 3:jedi academy. As you can see my system specs are well up to par and having that kind of framerate in planetside just seems unacceptable. I have tried cranking the settings up in planetside thinking it could be underused causing lower performance which was an nvidia problem back when gforce2 first came out. Even worse results. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as u can notice my frustration. Thank you and I can't wait to find a solution to this problem.