Half-Life 2 Runs Terrible...HELP!!

[Inferno83]

I used to have a geforce 4 ti 4200 and halflife 2 would run smoothly with 1024x768 resolution.

I have a 9800XT overclocked @ 430MHZ, an AthlonXP-M @ 2.5GHZ and 512MB of RAM, and the game takes a minimum of 30-45 seconds during each "loading" scene...I can run at 1280x1024 but it seems to lag when there is anything going on...

Is it my ATI Catalyst driver? Should i try the Omgea drivers? Is it my SATA drivers?

It doesnt make any sense, but the game is running crappy, HELP!!!

[EvilTwo]

512MB of ram? play half life 1 with that.

[IAmGhostDog]

and the game takes a minimum of 30-45 seconds during each "loading" scene..

Bump up your memory to 1Gb/
Todays games don't cut it with 2x256.

[Inferno83]

well i have some crappy Micron Ram 2x512..i put that in along with another 256 stick, so i have 1.256GB of RAM..and...THE PROBLEM IS STILL HAPPENING!!!

What is going on? extremely long loading times how do i fix that?

[pablo]

sounds like you may need to defrag the hard drive to me. I would give that a try and see where your load times go from there.

Paul

[RacerX27]

If it worked great at 1024x768 set it back to that and see if it gets better.

Update chipset drivers
update video card drivers
update sound card drivers

It is sometimes best to do a fresh install of windows with a video card change. Sometimes parts of the nivdia drivers are left behind and can cause problems. Sometimes.

If you are setting with higher quality settings with a higher res it could cause harddrive swapping issues. Long load times. Large res and higher quality setting sometimes require larger map loading files.

Another options is reinstalling HL2 from scratch. Just uninstall it, go to steampowered.com reload steam and download and install the game with the ATI card installed. Lots of games install video card specific files that once a brand is changed can cause problems.

I don't remember what res I played HL2 with on my 9800XT but it was likely 1280x1024, that is my normal desktop res and I played games at that res.

[Pehu]

Another options is reinstalling HL2 from scratch. Just uninstall it, go to steampowered.com reload steam and download and install the game with the ATI card installed. Lots of games install video card specific files that once a brand is changed can cause problems.

That's a heck of a lot of DLng for basically nothing. I disagree about the 'video card specific files' part too, if a game is up to scratch.
Defragmenting the HD is a better idea, although I'd imagine the game should not really be any more fragmented than it used to be with the Gf4Ti or you done a reinstall since then?

What I would consider after changing the vid card from a Dx8.0 card to a Dx9 card (4Ti to 9800Pro) is checking all the video options. It is likely that a lot of them are quite a bit higher now (perhaps even AA up high?), which may indeed be at least somewhat behind the slowdowns.

[RacerX27]

I disagree about the 'video card specific files' part too, if a game is up to scratch.

What 'scratch' is I'm not sure. Scratched disk?

I'm pretty sure Farcry has video card specific files, and I know for sure that GTA Vice City does.



I did forget to add updating Direct X to the latest version. Any of the latest games will pretty much do that for you and won't let you install the game unless you do a DX update.

[cantankerous]

Is there a place where the absolute latest DX 9.0c or even SP2 for that matter can be downloaded? I am still installing the original release of SP2 with DX 9.0c when I format. I f there is updated versions I would like them. I am wondering how you tell the difference between what version you have however as it is still called 9.0c correct?

[RacerX27]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

That link should take you to the Dec 2005 Redist, so you can save it and use it anytime.

[madhatter256]

Those will help. Another thing that will help too, is to turn off HDR. Ever since Valve updated their games to have HDR rendering, it slowed down the cards of 9600Pro to 9800pro. Disable that and you should be getting the old FPS you were getting before.

Another thing I noticed is that Steam no longer keeps my favorite servers . It's been doing this for the past few days. Its obviously a bug caused by their new update, hope it gets fixed asap.

[3dfxrain]

Steam is awful, honestly its like this one big trojan horse program and can make your whole compy seem like its the buggiest thing ever. Personally I never use it because its not reliable enough and I have had a extremely bad experience with Valve which will cause me to never buy a Valve related product again.

On the other hand I would like to mention other games with are worthy. Such as Call of Duty, its expansion and sequel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Red Orchestra for UT2004, UT2004 itself, World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2 and Medal Of Honor which I consider as the best multiplayer gaming has to offer.

[Inferno83]

ended up formatting machine, and installing the newest Omega Drivers based on the Newest ATI drivers that were just realesed.

i am running high resolutions and everything seems good also added that extra 1gb of ram, excellent. i believe its the omega drivers to explain for this. thanks guys

[Poci]

Yes steam sux balls I also lost my favs after latest update but come on guys CS source is still one of the best online fps along with bf2

[runamonk]

I used to have a geforce 4 ti 4200 and halflife 2 would run smoothly with 1024x768 resolution.

I have a 9800XT overclocked @ 430MHZ, an AthlonXP-M @ 2.5GHZ and 512MB of RAM, and the game takes a minimum of 30-45 seconds during each "loading" scene...I can run at 1280x1024 but it seems to lag when there is anything going on...

Is it my ATI Catalyst driver? Should i try the Omgea drivers? Is it my SATA drivers?

It doesnt make any sense, but the game is running crappy, HELP!!!

The load times with HL2 have been around since it's first release. It's just a piggy. I love the game but the load times have always been unacceptable to me. Even with my new system it's still slower than I would like.

I had a 9800XT when HL2 was released and it played the game fine, of course I wasn't overclocking either.