Use opengl renderer if you are not.

Ignore this, For some reason I thought he was talking about the original half-life, i missed it.

There's no OpenGL renderer in launch HL2. That was added later on when they added Mac support.

I remember most of my HL2 launch performance problems to be i/o / swap related with it not really caching in sounds well. There was also a fandom that denied HL2 having problems then putting the blame on a bad pirated version (i had hl2 on my steam since '04, so).

When I did go back to complete HL2 on a Radeon x850, it was a pre-orange box build with busted fog issues - but didn't have performance problems. Didn't run it on a P4 though

The slowdown is such that everything will load really fast (I'm using a small 120gig SSD with an IDE to SATA bridge at UDMA5).

However, open scenes which are even the slightiest bit more demanding in terms of polycount and physics (i.e wherever I'm looking at that isn't a corridor) make the framerate tank really bad. Win98SE or XP it's really the same. Supposedly, that molex connector is plugged in quite tight.

RAM, although slow for P4 DDR standards thanks to this VIA chipset, should be plenty in terms of size, never going over a total of 650mb ingame.

I think you should bench the CPU alone to see if it's performing like it should, the drastic difference in FPS usually points to a CPU limitation

The cpu is absolutely not the problem. The original 2004 HL2 requires a 1.2GHz cpu minimum. So that 2.8GHz P4 is more than enough. Considering the P4 2.8 (Northwood) came out in August 2002, it absolutely would not be an obsolete cpu at the time of HL2's release.

The problem is either the motherboard, the ide to sata adapter or the FireGL card.

@subhuman@xgtx; do you have anther non-workstation videocard to test with?

Yeah, something is off here. I played through at launch with an Athlon XP (I want to say 2600+) and a Radeon 9800 Pro at that resolution and it was smooth sailing. While my setup likely had a bit an edge on the CPU side, your GPU is MUCH faster. I would have anticipated 100+ fps even with 2x AA enabled. How's the frame pacing? Does it drop to a steady 40 or is it more like 100 fps bursts with choppy freezing?

NitroX infinity wrote on Today, 11:46:

The cpu is absolutely not the problem. The original 2004 HL2 requires a 1.2GHz cpu minimum. So that 2.8GHz P4 is more than enough. Considering the P4 2.8 (Northwood) came out in August 2002, it absolutely would not be an obsolete cpu at the time of HL2's release.

The problem is either the motherboard, the ide to sata adapter or the FireGL card.

@subhuman@xgtx; do you have anther non-workstation videocard to test with?

I will have an X850 XT AGP coming during the next weeks but the only cards I can test right now are this and then a normal 64mb Geforce3 and a 9000 PRO which wouldn't run this game in directx9 at all.

I tried a Tualatin 1400-s @1750 + Asus Tusl2c setup with the FireGL and the result is pretty much the same, albeit with lower averages, of course.

I have similar performance on my X1650 Pro and Athlon XP 3000+, 100-90fps in closed areas and 25 to 40fps in open areas, I am playing the Orange Box edition.

Are you sure your cpu running @2.8 Ghz ? Your motherboard supports only 400mhz fsb so you should have 2.1ghz . Also this motherboard is crappy one with VIA PM266 chipset it was packet in white boxes without any brand mention on it as manufactors scared intel's comply .If you want better results just go with intel 845E/848 chipsets.

Comparing my Amptron M930 (SiS 645) to an ECS P4VXASD2+ (Via P4X333) with all else the same, I was surprised at the performance gap between the two. The SiS 645 was significantly better all around; all of these scores were after I tweaked everything I could on both systems to achieve the highest scores I could.

And the Amptron board (combined with a 9800 SE with the pipelines unlocked) wouldn't have been a machine that I would want to try HL-2 on; I did find it satisfactory for Half-Life, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift.

Repo Man11 wrote on Today, 18:50:

Comparing my Amptron M930 (SiS 645) to an ECS P4VXASD2+ (Via P4X333) with all else the same, I was surprised at the performance gap between the two. The SiS 645 was significantly better all around; all of these scores were after I tweaked everything I could on both systems to achieve the highest scores I could.

And the Amptron board (combined with a 9800 SE with the pipelines unlocked) wouldn't have been a machine that I would want to try HL-2 on; I did find it satisfactory for Half-Life, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift.

its not same ati 9800 vs fx 5600

ciornyi wrote on Today, 19:14:

Repo Man11 wrote on Today, 18:50:

Comparing my Amptron M930 (SiS 645) to an ECS P4VXASD2+ (Via P4X333) with all else the same, I was surprised at the performance gap between the two. The SiS 645 was significantly better all around; all of these scores were after I tweaked everything I could on both systems to achieve the highest scores I could.

And the Amptron board (combined with a 9800 SE with the pipelines unlocked) wouldn't have been a machine that I would want to try HL-2 on; I did find it satisfactory for Half-Life, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift.

its not same ati 9800 vs fx 5600

Look at the images more closely.

ciornyi wrote on Today, 17:48:

Are you sure your cpu running @2.8 Ghz ? Your motherboard supports only 400mhz fsb so you should have 2.1ghz . Also this motherboard is crappy one with VIA PM266 chipset it was packet in white boxes without any brand mention on it as manufactors scared intel's comply .If you want better results just go with intel 845E/848 chipsets.

Yeah it definitely is. Factory stock it only supports 400 fsb chips, but I adjusted the front side bus to 132.

This is a Biostar branded board (U8668 "pro") with an universal AGP 2x/4x slot. Perhaps good for a Voodoo5, but this is what I had laying around at the moment.

Your suggestion does make sense, especially with how bad memory bandwidth seems to be on a similar board to mine's.