[MetalMilitia]

Does the game run like crap? (what's your video card?)

I tried playing TF2 at work before and had similar problems.

I believe they call it a "LOD" based system, which basically means the engine will monitor the game's performance and try and cut out as many effects as possible to keep performance above a certain threshold. Particularly things like particle effects are removed as they can have the largest impact on frame rate.