I'm going to look at my cfg this weekend after we're settled in and see if I can figure out what it was I did that made the lightbars more bearable for me and maybe it can help you also. I used to have the same problem, but fixing it had something to do with all the tweaking I did with r_mapoverbrightbits, r_gamma, r_overbrightbits, et cetera.

Save the snarky comments about "r_picmip 10 is lame, why don't you have a ten billion dollar graphics card and fifty-meter monitor like me? :D" Using all of these tweaks built into the game does give you smoother/better gameplay through higher possible framerates and more basic rendering if you can't afford a bunch of great equipment for your home computer. I'll be the first to brag about having a piece of crap onboard graphics card, 256MB RAM, white monitor w/black keyboard and grey OEM CPU case.

But hey, it gets the job done and I have tons of fun with it. That's what counts... and I'd like to help Mad raise his fun level a little bit if I can, eh?

Iam improving power of my comp by the time. In beginings of e+ i had AthlonXP1700+@1900+, 384MB DDR333 RAM, GeForce4 Ti4200, DFI AD75 with KT-333 chipset, two small (15" CRT) monitors and shitty mouse (first optical mouse by genius which was more expensive than todays creative fatal1ty 1010).

Now i have AthlonXP 3200+, 1024MB DDR400 ultralowlatency, GF6800, MSI K7N2 Delta2 platinum, 17" CRT (+ 15" old) monitor (the newest upgrade:-)) and razer diamondback magma + steelpad QcK+...

...and still using the same settings. Is true that my older hardware had some problems with high graphics on 125FPS but ig you start playing with enemymodels, enemycolors, picmip 3 or 4 and vertex lighting, its not easy go back. Game looks ugly but i see my enemies good and PB allows bigger picmips and enemymodels with enemycolors so why change it