Is my system up to speed?

[rocklobsta]

I just went and bought HL2, installed it, and when I tried to play it it is really slow, so slow, in fact, that I can't play it all. The sound and frames are choppy, like each frame takes a couple of seconds to move. :angry:

My specs are:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8 GHZ
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64MB RAM
768MB RAM

Will this cut it? Or do I need to upgrade? I mean, this laptop isn't that old, maybe a year and a half since I bought it. I got the latest drivers from OmegaDrivers.net and tried turning down my resolution to 800 x 600.

Can anyone help or give advice?

THANKS

 

[Glirk Dient]

Make sure you have the latest video drivers.

Turn graphical settings to lowest.

You vid card may be too low to run the game however, not even sure if it is supported.

 

[rocklobsta]

Thanks for the reply.

I got the latest drivers but it didn't make any difference.

I can't even change the graphical settings to lowest because when I click Options on the startup menu in HL2, I get the tabbed menu but with no drop downs showing. And it is really transparent, like I can barely see it. Seems odd.

 

[bosox188]

Hmm it shouldn't be running that badly, you have a good processor and decent ram. The videocard is a 9600 which is fine although the 64mb of memory on the card could be hurting you, that's very low.

 

[westie]

Try runing the game on a lower DX level.

 

[Ti133700N]

The Mobility Radeon 9600 is far from the desktop vid card 9600XT. It's only 64MB and takes less power. So yea it's normal that you get poor performances.

So what you can do to get better performances is to lower the settings. You can do it mannually in the console.

Try:
mat_dxlevel 70
mat_bloom 0
mat_bumpmap 0
mat_fastnobump 1
mat_fastspecular 1
mat_specular 0
mat_trilinear 0
r_drawdetailprops 0
r_dynamic 0
r_shadowmaxrendered -1
r_shadowrendertotexture 0
r_shadows 0
r_waterforceexpensive 0
r_worldlightmin 1
r_worldlights 1

You can try these settings one by one to see the difference because some of em will really drop the visual quality so if it's very ugly you can change it back.

Make sure the settings of your vid card are set to Never Antialiasing and Never Anisotropy Filtering (you can also change it in the game options).

 

[JellyWorld]

I could run HL2 on my dad's 1.7Ghz Pentium laptop with the same card as you and 256MB RAM with no problems. Lowest settings of course.

 

[rocklobsta]

I'll give it a try

THanks, I will try it throught the console!

 

[Ti133700N]

If it's still very slow and choppy after you set those settings, it must be a driver issue. Don't forget to do the Windows Updates, they often fix most of the problems (except SP2).

 

[Cole]

If it's still very slow and choppy after you set those settings, it must be a driver issue. Don't forget to do the Windows Updates, they often fix most of the problems (except SP2).

Umm.....Sp2 was fine for me dude...
I installed it...everything worked like a charm...the only thing I noticed that was new was whenever I start a totally new online game(just installed) then it will ask if I should run it..I click allow...and never comes up again....otherwize it feels the same for me.... I had no errors or anything.

 

[Ti133700N]

Yea it depends, some have problems with it, some don't. What is certain though is that you won't get better fps with SP2, it's only usefull for security reasons, if you don't have any firewall then it's better than nothing.

 

[Cole]

You wont get better FPS thats right. It fixes alot of holes in Xp though.