I got my ATI Rage 128 Pro 16MB in the mail, threw it in my mid-1999 gaming PC, installed the drivers, and everything went exactly as expected, even the overclocking (I raised it from 116/138 to 130/160), and used 3DMark 99 MAX as a way to tell if I was pushing the card too hard (looking for graphical mishaps, etc.), and got it down to that. At first, it seemed that I had really gotten over the low FPS garbage that I had been experiencing: GLQuake runs butter-smooth at 1024*768@32Bpp, whereas the TNT2 M64 ran fairly slow at 800*600 @ 32Bpp. Most of the time, you were better off playing in 640*480 @ 16Bpp in the case of GLQuake (you could go up to 800*600 @ 16Bpp on the TNT2 M64, but prepare to suffer frame drops). Quake II was the same exact story. The game ran excellently at 1024*768- the final game I had to test was Half-Life. And oh, boy, was that interesting.

The game seems to run perfectly fine- until you look at any NPCs, where the game will immediately dip down to 7FPS. It doesn't matter if you can't see them- if they are behind a wall, and you look at that wall, your FPS will again plummet from ~70-50FPS to 7-8FPS, almost exactly, mainly 7. It barely wavers from 7FPS- it will go up to 8FPS, but will go no lower than 7 unless there's quite a few NPCs. It's very strange. I tried enabling software sprite rendering, which did nothing, I tried almost every different setting that I could in Half-Life (Direct3D runs better, but is plagued with graphical garbage- I don't attribute that to my overclock simply becayse 3DMark uses DirectX for some of its stuff as well and I didn't have any problems there), and nothing changed. Anytime I look at NPCs, it always decides to go to 7FPS- it has gone lower, notably in the freezer area, where it became a slideshow. It was 7FPS while I was looking at the two headcrab zombies next to the freezer door at the overturned table.

I have no clue why this is a problem. I even tried to use 32-bit color instead of 16-bit color, because this card seems to like 32-bit color better, but it did nothing. I am so confused as to why the other games run great, but this runs so poorly. I get that HL1 WON uses more CPU than anything else, but this system has the same exact CPU (a Pentium III Katmai 500MHz), same exact amount of RAM (128MB PC100), same everything- the only thing I changed out was the video card. I know that people said ATI drivers can give the CPU more overhead, but this only happens when looking at NPCs, the rest of the rendering runs great.

Hell, even my Dell Latitude C600 with a 750MHz Pentium III Coppermine mobile CPU with 256MB of PC100 RAM and an ATI Mobility 3 graphics chipset doesn't do this- it uses ATI drivers, and it's not faster by a massive enough margin for this kind of a performance gap to occur. I was excited for Half-Life when I started it up after seeing GLQuake and Quake II, but apparently I was wrong. I expected it to not be as big of a difference, but I totally didn't expect the performance to stoop this low.