Yes, you found the evil spot where nothing can be done to improve performance !
At this place, 3/4 of the map geometry is visible, and cause it's one of the higher spot, hint brush can't help.
No offense, but on my computer there is 2 SG map that are more CPU consuming : CoyoteBluff and Lake. On those 2 maps I must change my screensize from 1280x1024 down to 800x600 or I can't hit anything. I still can play Alamo with full quality graphics on my computer.
My computer is 5 years old, and was a low price computer (it's not an Athlon but a Sempron, my G-Force video card wasn't the more expensive the day I buy it) so I was expecting that it will run fine on most computer.
You know, I've got 60~70 FPS on most area, there is only 3 places that hurt, the one you found (as well as just under that place), the second floor of the big house while looking outside, and standing on the wall we see at the left of your screenshot. I've got only 35~40 FPS there. But everywhere it is fine.
I'm really sorry, but the hint brushing can't be better, the only thing that can be done is to remove object (wagon, market and most of object in the big house), but it's a hard price just for those 3 places, isn't it ?
I have already tried to move into wordspawn most of func_door_rotating just for testing, it doesn't change anything, and I've tested it with breakable, they only hurt framerate when they are exploiding.
You know, we have done many thing to keep it playable on old computer, and trust me, Coup' George was really sad everytime I say to him : resize this texture it is too VRAM consuming ! And I was sad too everytime I have removed one mapobject to save polycount. We have change the lightmapscale from 0.125 to 0.25 to save VRAM as well. I have made a very complex hintbrushing (if one day you will open my map in radiant, you will see how complex it is, and every single hint has one specific task to achieve). And I would love using multi-texturing, but I have surrender :S
It is the concept of the map itself that is CPU-killer, just like Lake.
Sure, next time we will choose a concept that is really much more easy to optimize
Probably duel map, more easy to have kick-ass graphics without performance counterpart.
Another point is that, if we compare Smokin' Guns to other still living Q3 mod, like World Of Padman or Urban Terror, we see that they can't run with full quality graphics on old computer (on this two game I have compressed texture enable and have turned texture quality to medium). One more time, I don't have to lower graphics quality on my map. So here is the question : should all SG map keep the same in order to still run on very old computer ? Or should we improve our map to follow the path of other Q3 mod ? IMHO, we should follow the path of World Of Padman and Urban Terror, just because old computer can still play with low graphics setting. So no difference for old computer.
There is only one boring thing about this : old Iron Claw map vs new SG map. As long as Iron Claw map aren't tune up, it would be boring because old computer owner can't have a config that works with all map, they would have full graphics on Iron Claw map, but should change their setting every time a SG map is loaded on a server.
Well, let's talk about something else
I've spoted one bug in my map, on the saloon door, sometime this texture disappear :
Not sure about this, but I think it's related to a bad mipmapping. I will try to fix it (remove mipmap for this tex) before releasing my map to the public.