Hiya all long time no posting here.

The 2003-2004 era gaming bug recently bite me and during the last couple of days I put together a Biostar P4M266 board, along with 2x512 sticks, a 2.8 ghz Pentium 4 with 533 fsb and a FireGL X3 256 modded to 16 pipelines (560/530) with retail Radeon drivers (Catalyst 6.2), all running under Win XP SP3. The card is set to AGP 4X (the max supported by the chipset) with FW on, with an aperture size of 256mb.

I managed to get the retail 2004 version of Half-Life 2 working on this system. However, to my dismay, the framerate at 1024x768 no AA is simply abysmal, dropping from 130+ fps in indoor areas to 30-40 fps during the first sections of the railway underpass/tunnel.

Is the retail version of the game known to perform shittastically? Or is it this VIA chipset is just lacking too much in terms of memory bandwith and AGP performance? I find it quite curious how 3DMark03 gives me a score of 110xx, which is probably a sign of a CPU bottleneck but nonetheless a good enough score to run this game fluently.

Cheers!