Hey guys, been trying to push my rig to its limits for tf2 lately. Go ahead and try these settings, see if they work for you (you would be surprised, a lot of these have only a negligible drop in FPS associated with them)

If you do not have a multi-core processor, you should remove the "threaded" cvars.

Also, to get the most out of mem_max_heapsize, you should add -heapsize 2048000 to your launch options for TF2. These settings are optimal for 4GBs of ram (only allocating half for the cvars.) If you have 2GBS, halve both the cvar and the launch option. If you have 1GB, halve it again, but don't expect to pull very much extra performance out of it.

Code:
mat_picmip -10
mat_bumpmap 1
mat_specular 1
mat_parallaxmap 1
r_lod 0
r_threaded_particles 1
r_threaded_renderables 1
r_threaded_client_shadow_manager 1
cl_threaded_bone_setup 1
cl_threaded_client_leaf_system 1
mp_usehwmmodels 1
mp_usehwmvcds 1

mem_max_heapsize 1024