Horde3D

I get ~32 fps with fallout 3
but I only get ~18 fps with horde chicago demo

Yeah there's a lot of optimisation work that could be done.
The forward lit pipeline does not batch lights into the same pass, so there's a lot more CPU/vertex-shader load than there could be.
The deffered lit pipeline does not use light-geometry to cull unnecessary pixels, so there's a lot more pixel-shader load than there could be.

I'm sure there's discussions about both of these points somewhere on here

Since very recently that's not true any longer (although it doesn't have an influence on Chicago as the single light is usually covering the whole screen).

Anyway, I get around 180 fps in the Chicago sample with a recent 80 euro card (HD 5670).


Which hardware and OS are you using? Chicago is heavily challenging the vertex processing whereas for a shipped game like Fallout, the bottlenecks are certainly way more balanced (trading less geometric complexity against more expensive pixel processing from parallax mapping, etc.).

"Very recently" as in, "it's in the SVN trunk"?
Awesome! You just made my day