It does have a built-in timedemo but Valve broke some of it (especially if it's a multiplayer demo, all players will default to gordon and many events won't be sent)

I believe that Half-Life performance all depends on what version, as well as the modifications and custom maps you play. Running Team Fortress Classic with 12 bots I average pretty low but playable performance on my P3 and Voodoo3 system, but single player mods like Poke646 are no problem.

Have you edited a autoexec or other .cfg files? Some tweaks can make or break the game I find.

leileilol wrote:

It does have a built-in timedemo but Valve broke some of it (especially if it's a multiplayer demo, all players will default to gordon and many events won't be sent)

Indeed. 3Fingers' Blowout timedemo was pretty popular back in 1998-1999, however it will not run if you have a newer version than 1.0.0.5 (AFAIR). Half-Life is exceptionally CPU demanding, are you getting these kinds of performance drops on Single Player? Are you using a Pentium 3 or Celeron CPU?

do you run windows xp ?
then upgrade to 512Mb at least.

I'm on 98, but I think I'll upgrade anyway.

My CPU is a celeron yes. SL5XT.

And yep, dips are all in single player. Anything with a large area or much action causes big drops. I use the damn scene with the helicopter as kinda a worst case scenario option.

Fusion, what kind of tweaks would you suggest?

Cheers.

Hm 1Ghz coppermine Celeron should handle it without trouble.

Do you use VIA Chipset or Intel ?
If using VIA use older 4 in 1 Drivers.

I've got a Tualatin 1400 in a powerleap adaptor, 1gb ram, TI4600 and a pair of voodoo 2's in SLI and it runs at 71fps according to the internal fps meter (type cl_showfps 1) in console

I seem to remember it was running at around 50-55 steady with a P3 500 (Could have been a 550) before I put the powerleap in.

71fps is the max frame rate if you don't have vsync enabled (weird right) so that's definitely not your max fps.

Try max_fps 100 and could you tell me what you get? Also where in the game are you getting that? Either way I appreciate it since it seems like my pc is underperforming.

Good point in the drivers though, I will update them, my chooser is intel.

If you give me a day or so ill put together a 1ghz, 256mb machine on an intel 815e chipset motherboard and let you know my fps, I'm not sure if I've got a 4200 laying around but have a 5200 i can throw in

That would be amazing if you did, I'd love to hear what performance you get.

Here are some games on an Athlon 1 GHz (Socket A) and PowerVR Kyro II: https://youtu.be/D_CPYUvTK9g

The Kyro II is around the level of a GeForce 256 ~ GeForce2, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

At 10:00 you can see Half-Life demo running with FRAPS. It runs ok, but doesn't hold the 72 FPS at all times with dips to around 50 FPS I would say.

Thanks for that Phil, your game certainly seems to run more stable than mine. You get the same dips when explosions happens as I do, but not as extreme. That scene with the shipping containers outside I'm fairly sure would tank my FPS.

I'll download the demo and give it a go.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Here are some games on an Athlon 1 GHz (Socket A) and PowerVR Kyro II: https://youtu.be/D_CPYUvTK9g

The Kyro II is around the level of a GeForce 256 ~ GeForce2, sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

At 10:00 you can see Half-Life demo running with FRAPS. It runs ok, but doesn't hold the 72 FPS at all times with dips to around 50 FPS I would say.

I am confusing the hell out of myself now.

So I have a RIVA TNT2 and a GeForce 2MX, one of them I wanted to put into my Pentium 3 450. I asked here on VOGONS and everybody said GeForce 2MX.

Now you are saying you are running about GeForce 2MX on a system one generation older, and a bit less than twice the speed.

So at this point I don't know which I should use. I like the RIVA TNT2 better, but people said to use the GeForce 2MX, and it is faster.

I would also use the GeForce2 MX or 400 (Not the 200 though) rather than the TNT2. Half-Life won't run that great on a Pentium II, it really needs a strong CPU. But in other games you can enjoy higher resolutions and settings with the GeForce2 MX.

I don't understand what's wrong with my setup. I just tried Unreal Gold. and I get highs of 200fps, but if I turn around sometimes I'm getting 48fps constant.

That's on 320x200 with everything at minimum settings.

Look, just sat there:

320 x 200 is hardly getting proper acceleration even if supported, i'd go higher; still i think the dips are not the gpus fault imho

No it's definitely not the gpu, but I wanted to see if resolution had any affect. It doesn't at all, but surely a 1ghz cpu can drive Unreal at 60fps? Same with System Shock 2, I was dipping into the low 40s, and considering the system requirements that seems super low.

how are your results compared to similar systems in more standardized benchmarks?

Looking at 3dmark99 scores, it suggests my CPU is definitely underperforming, the same clocked CPU as mine paired with a TNT2 is getting higher scores. I'm just working off memory at the moment though, I'll have something more concrete later.