Half Life 2 and Dual Core/SLI - Help please!

[JackBauer24]

Hi guys, this is my first post as you can well see. We just got a new computer in our house, much to my delight - as my old one was never very good at playing HL2 - and now I can play through the whole thing with no troubles Or so I thought... My new rig incorporates both Dual Core and SLI technology - here are the specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Dual Core Processor (2.4ghz, 4mb)
GPU: 2x 256mb nVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT - nVIDIA SLI Configuration

Now my problem is, I don't know very much about how either technology works. What I do know is that Steam only seems to be recognizing one core, telling me that my CPU speed is 2400mhz. I was disappointed in this seeing as that's barely above what my old PC managed (2.2ghz) - does this mean HL2 is only running at 2.4ghz? Can I get it any faster?

HL2 seems to be running smooth enough (certainly better than my old PC) but the Lost Coast demo I tried is quite a poor performance (the benchmark had it at about 22fps). Is this about right for my specs or should it be going faster. I worry how Episodes I and II will handle now. Could this in anyway be a problem with my SLI set-up?

Again, sorry for my appalling technical knowledge - I would be very grateful if someone could explain to me just how this all works and how I can get the most out of my games. I'd hate to think there was plenty of untapped potential in my new PC that I just didn't know how to get out.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Cole]

Now my problem is, I don't know very much about how either technology works. What I do know is that Steam only seems to be recognizing one core, telling me that my CPU speed is 2400mhz. I was disappointed in this seeing as that's barely above what my old PC managed (2.2ghz) - does this mean HL2 is only running at 2.4ghz? Can I get it any faster?

Ghz is only speed. There is another major factor, how much can be done at once. An Amd 2.2ghz processor can beat an intel 3.4 ghz processor.

Now you have a Conroe cpu. Your cpu is much faster than lets say a Pentium 4 running at 2.4ghz. It is much more similar to an AMD processor(mine runs at 2.4ghz but can beat a 3.5ghz P4). Your CPU could be compared to maybe a P4 at 4 ghz if not better.

Anyway HL2, and just about every game released, only uses one core of the CPU.

HL2 seems to be running smooth enough (certainly better than my old PC) but the Lost Coast demo I tried is quite a poor performance (the benchmark had it at about 22fps). Is this about right for my specs or should it be going faster. I worry how Episodes I and II will handle now. Could this in anyway be a problem with my SLI set-up?

Try running it in single gpu mode.

Also how much ram do you have?

 

[JackBauer24]

Thanks for clearing up the CPU issue. I think what was worrying me about my CPU speed was that every time I loaded up Lost Coast - Steam would pop up a warning message saying I really needed 2.9ghz to run it, and that I only have 2.4ghz. Is Steam just plain wrong here?

The GPU settings are quite, quite confusing. I've been trying out a few games these past few days. Doom 3 seemed to love the SLI antialiasing and runs like a dream - however Quake 4 really didn't like it and actually ran better before I even enabled SLI! HL2 runs fine under my current conditions but like I say Lost Coast is fairly slow. I've done a lot of blind tinkering (without really knowing what I'm doing), including setting 'SLI rendering mode' to 'single-GPU', but nothing seems to have had much of an effect on LC. My global settings are currently:

Antialiasing settings: SLI16x
Anisotropic filtering: Application-controlled
System Performance: High Quality
Colour Profile: Not Available
Vertical Sync: Application-controlled
Force mipmaps: Trilinear
Conformant texture clamp: On
Extension Limit: Off
Hardware acceleration: Single Display Mode
Trilinear optimization: Off
Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
Gamma correct antialiasing: Off
Transparency antialiasing: Supersampling
Triple buffering: On
SLI rendering mode: SLI antialiasing
Negative LOD bias: Allow
Threaded optimization: Auto
OpenGL Error Reporting: On

I'm not sure what half this stuff means...
Oh, my RAM is 2gb.

 

[Fliko]

E6600 out of the box pretty much beats all of the AMD processors at the moment, just so you don't think your processor is slow, because it is one of the fastest processors that a home PC can get.

 

[giant384]

turn antialiasing to application controlled. that might be the thing that is slowing it down.

 

[Beerdude26]

Also, change your heapsize to a HIGHER number. To do this follow these steps:

Left-click on the Steam tray icon.

Select "Games".

Click on the "My Games" tab.

Right-click on "Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, if you want it with that)".

Select "Properties".

Click on the "General" tab.

Click on the "Set Launch Options" button.

Put in the window box: -heapsize 1048576

Click "OK".

Click "Close".