Well, I can't see how a framerate over 75-odd benefits you at all, given that your MONITOR only has a refresh rate of (usually) 75Hz. That is, it's only redrawing the screen 75 times per second. My system specs are similar to yours (P4 2.0GHz, GeForce4 Ti4400). You're not alone with the capped framerate - mine sits just on 80fps, never more. But, it's a steady 80fps - it doesn't lose frames either (if it did, that would be something to worry about).
I don't have a problem with it. When I did DirectX programming, I learnt about how to get a flicker-free image, like you'd want in a game, on the screen. It's a bit complicated, but suffice to say that the game synchronises the rate at which it renders frames on the screen, with the redraw rate of the monitor. So if your monitor runs at the standard refresh rate of 75Hz (ie 75 redraws per second), the most you'll get is 75 individual frames per second. You can't get more pictures per second than that, because it's only drawing 75 times every second.
Of course, that then throws up the question of, how come some people are reporting framerates of 100 or more? With what I was taught, I honestly can't answer that, but I would surmise that the video card isn't synchronised with the monitor for rendering frames; the extra frames are being rendered internally as normal, but discarded before they can be drawn to screen because the machine has already rendered another one. Otherwise, you'd experience 'tearing', which is what happens when the image being drawn is changed *as* the monitor is drawing it (but if the refresh rate is fast enough, you probably wouldn't notice). Either that, or they're playing with an LCD screen or something hehe.
And anyway, because of persistence of vision, the human eye cannot discern individual frames at rates above 25 fps, and 75Hz/fps is well above that.
Unfortunately I can't help you with the problems of lag and a reduction in framerate you say you're getting when (and only when) opponents are on the screen, except that it shouldn't happen, unless you mean lag as in the trucks moving jerkily during an online race, which is most likely the fault of your network connection...
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