Half-Life 2 Optimisation Guide

[Chris D]

What with all the excitement over the Counter-Strike: Source release last night, and of course the fact that I played every single new map back to back, we forgot to report on this very helpful article.[br]
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The guys over at IGN Gear have written up a five page guide on optimising your computer in preperation for Half-Life 2, and why not CS:Source too considering most of us have it?

After weeding out that spyware and updating your drivers, you'll want to clean your machine's registry. We'd recommend doing this after searching for spyware as there may be small but useless remnants of removed spyware in the registry left over, so you might as well scan for spyware first and clean the registry afterwards.

There's certainly some things I've neglected to do with my computer and this guide is very helpful.[br]
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You can find the full article here.

 

[thefunkygibbon]

think everyone's too busy playing CS:Source to read that or reply

 

[Lemonking]

damm it i have to wait until tonite

 

[Ecthe|ioN]

Thank you Chris_D

I'm off to optimize

 

[azz0r]

I hate crappy guides like this.

Virus scan - spyware scan - uninstall crap - close all useless programs - defrag and gain a mere 1fps increase! YEAH

 

[SMT]

I hate crappy guides like this.

Virus scan - spyware scan - uninstall crap - close all useless programs - defrag and gain a mere 1fps increase! YEAH

I tend to agree. It seems like there are hundreds of guides on the internet with the exact same regurgitated information. I'd also argue that the branding of the guide is vacuous since these "tweaks" won't noticeably affect performance in Half-Life 2 one way or the other. Still, there are plenty of people who don't know about some or all of the aforementioned tweaks, and they will have a legitimate benefit to overall system health if properly done.

 

[Chris D]

It's not just about fps either. For example my PC has started crashing a lot and I'm betting that if I do the standard clean up (most recommended in this guide) that the general stability of my machine will increase.

 

[Cujo]

Every slightly intelligent individual knows that clean computer is working better not only in case of games.
Well, i guess this guide was written to someone else.

 

[sharp]

The guide saying enable Trueform when you have an Ati card.

I have a Ati Rad. X800. I set Trueform to application preference (only 2 options I can choose: off and app. preference) . How can I know CS S using Trueform when I play?

 

[SMT]

The guide saying enable Trueform when you have an Ati card.

I have a Ati Rad. X800. I set Trueform to application preference (only 2 options I can choose: off and app. preference) . How can I know CS S using Trueform when I play?

Skip Trueform. Shut it off. Trust me. The marginal benefits (since CS: Source models are pretty hi-poly to begin with) are not worth the performance hit.

 

[kingomar]

Skip Trueform. Shut it off. Trust me. The marginal benefits (since CS: Source models are pretty hi-poly to begin with) are not worth the performance hit.

But you need it for HL2 that's for sure (You don't have to use it but it provides better game performance).That's according to that guide anyways.
:bounce:

 

[T_O87]

ty chris_d for this helpfull articule . it helped me very much my fps better and evrything ty again

 

[SMT]

But you need it for HL2 that's for sure (You don't have to use it but it provides better game performance).That's according to that guide anyways.
:bounce:

That's simply untrue. The guide is casually mistaken on this point at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.

EDIT: The guide does not say TrueForm will provide better performance, it merely says that HL2 will support TrueForm. This means the model vertices are optimized for use with TrueForm, but you need to understand that TrueForm still involves a major performance hit for a negligible increase in image quality. If you want to improve your framerates, TrueForm should be the very first thing you disable.

 

[SubKamran]

I'm creating the "The [Truly] Complete Guide to Securing Your Computer" which will tell you how to... secure... your computer.

I hope it will be helpful, I'm trying to find time amongst all this homework. ;(

 

[Alientank]

Wait wait wait, so, as a 6800 GT user I should use quality mode, not high quality mode because High quality is no better and it kills my framerates? And just adjust the settings they suggest for image quality?

 

[Dynasty]

lol tut tut chris you were on cs:s far too much last night.....but yeah people are far too busy playing cs:s atm to read general knowledge stuff like that :E

 

[Xenon]

Well, now I have pretty much done everything on the list, except defragmenting my drives, that will have to wait until tonight.
And of course wait fir IGN to post an update on the omptimization guide-

 

[LeXo5]

useless guide ...... its all common knowledge

 

[Hazar]

there are some helpfull reminders, but yeah, pretty basic stuff there.

 

[kurly]

useless guide ...... its all common knowledge

For us geeks, yes. But lots of peepl like to play games, but know nothing about the computer they play them on.

Its a good recap for keeping the general knowledge up.

(and I hadn't heard of Crap Cleaner, that may be useful)

 

[A True Canadian]

Same here (about Crap Cleaner).

It's a pretty basic and straight-forward guide to make your PC much healthier. They even say at the end that the guide was just a warm-up compared to what will be included in PART 2.

I now finally know what TRUEFORM is, and I'm off to experiment with it.

 

[Vinnie_NL]

If you find that defragmenting takes a very long time maybe you should consider Diskeeper 8.0. It's much faster than the standard Windows method and it shows how many the performance of your harddisk(s) has improved in milliseconds and percents. You can download a trial version at http://www.executive.com/defrag/defrag.asp. If you want the full version you have to pay MONEY.

 

[Bicka]

That's simply untrue. The guide is casually mistaken on this point at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.

EDIT: The guide does not say TrueForm will provide better performance, it merely says that HL2 will support TrueForm. This means the model vertices are optimized for use with TrueForm, but you need to understand that TrueForm still involves a major performance hit for a negligible increase in image quality. If you want to improve your framerates, TrueForm should be the very first thing you disable.

Yup, this the only reason I actually came to post a comment here.

Enabling Truform is and always will be, a drain on performance. Especially on cards over the 9500's where truform is solely calculated by the cpu and not the graphics card.

You can actually see the performance drop and increase from using this in cs1.6 right now by enabling truform in the drivers and changing these settings to "0":

ati_npatch
ati_subdiv

Maybe this guide was created in mind for HL2 coming out in 2006 instead?

 

[Adrien C]

Most of it is comon knowledge, apart from the card settings, and that Tuning program for XP.
It allways good to do that for any games.
Stiky for me.

 

[j0nathanbs23]

Couple of things I didn't know about, but yea mostly common knowledge. Even though after I did follow it my framerate did jump bout 10 frames, not that great of an improvment, but sumthing considering I only get 40 frames at best. During a big fight it goes down to 15, and I even overclocked my card. I really need a new CPU/Video Card.

 

[Alec_85]

http://www.saywhatagain.co.uk/stuff/guide.swf
This swf-file is also quite good.

 

[A True Canadian]

It appears that the rest of the article is now avaliable. :bounce:

There's some interesting and helpful information about tuning Windows XP to your maximum gaming experience.

Good read.