Right here

The main problem these days is fill-rate. This is where the GPU-VRAM speeds come into the game. But if you have a V5 and the game still runs, go to 800x600 resolution and voila: 60fps or more in most of the games as oposed to the 15fps in 1280x960.

Get the resolution down a bit, change to 16 bit color depth, and the V5 can stand a chance of running faster than 60 fps, if the CPU is fast enough (2Ghz in this year).

Bus mastering, AGP 4x, are mostly less important than you would think. For example, a test with Unreal Tournament 2003 on Banshee hit a fps of 15. On a S3 Savage4 board (has AGP and Bus Mastering), the result was the same. AGP and Bus mastering give you some more speed, if the board is built for that, and IF THE GPU IS NOT ALREADY RUNNING ON IT'S LIMITS. If it runs at it's geometrical (polygons) or raster speed (textures)maximum, even an AGP 8x can't solve anything...

If you are thinking that "Hyper Treading" will give you any significative plus, you are wrong. HT will give you an advantage if the APP is build for that. And remember, even these days, things like 3DNow! and SSE (even SSE2), are not used in most of the games, and even the fewer that have this optimization it would at most bring you 5fps more. That's all that you can get.

Another surprise: Pentium 4 are worse for games and apps in general than the Pentium 3. Some magazines tested same speed P4 and P3 (1.4 Ghz), and in most of the cases, the P3 (especially in heavy working as in games), rocketed by 5 or more fps in front of the P4. Also the marketing maneuver with the P3 at 1.4 Ghz been priced so high is a proof of the will of excluding such unpleasant reviews from the public, and don't cast a shadow on the P4.

P4 is more than P3, much more a success of the marketing: even if the RIMMS were not good, were huge costly, and bring heating problems and high latency as oposed to DDR, still there were thousands of RIMMS sold. Heavy Advertising maked that possible.

Also, think this way:  if the XP 3200+ is a little behind the P4 at the same frequency (3.2 Ghz), and it succeed in certain cases to overpass it (in games mostly), even if it runs at 2 Ghz in real frequency, who's the useless, and the poorly designed: P4. And also costs a dozen more than XP 3200...

Still, things are not going to be that fast: you have to remember that the processor is always accesing the same memory, no matter how fast or in how many slices the bus is divided. Even with DDR, a multi-threading process still have to rely on the I/O commands of the Bios.

More, it has been demonstrated that if you access nearly the same thing in RAM, you gain no advantage. Let's say that 2 commands are issued: sound on one thread, video on another. What you get: bottleneck on the audio thread, since it always have to wait for the green signal to proceed to the PCI bus, after the video. And if the sound thread needs resources from memory to generate the necessary mixing, this thread is put on a waitstate, and performance will not increase.

Also, remember all the time, that even if you have Multi-threading, a serious part of the activity still is produced by the kernel itself, which even if it is occupying only one thread, it can still trouble the second thread speed, since the first thing that an app is doing is calling the kernel.

Changing the arhitecture of Windows, and develop a means to avoid using the slow Windows kernel (as in the Windows 3.1 era was done with the GDI to provide speed in graphics), is mostly the true answer to the performance problems, in a much more convincing and certain way than HT.

A well designed and efficient system, wouldn't require HT to go fast, as an Airplane didn't require a full passengers numbers not a half, to be able to have the passengers to feel comfortable.

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Wouldn't it be great if microsoft released a windows strictly for gamers, designed with a faster and more efficient kernel that could efficiently handle all these features, without all the networking and advanced GUI and all that crap? It could be a little less "user-friendly", but I would pay good money for that. Heck, didn't they do something along those lines a few years ago? I think it was called "linux"  

EDIT: fixed code

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Indeed... That is so very true...