Nvidia 6800 bad fps in Half Life 2 ?!?!?!?!?!

[bloghead]

I got a new card in and I don't understand why my frames per second aren't any higher. I used to run a msi 5900xt and it ran half life around 40fps. I just got a new bfg 6800oc and it runs at around 60-80 and sometimes drops really low near 30. Does anyone have any idea of what might be causing this??? I have a 2800 amd atholon xp. 768mb ram. Nforce mother board.

 

[Rocketman9mm]

i have that card and my game runs awesome. what settings do you play the game at? i'm on an athlon 64 3500+

 

[OD-Black_Fire]

It's a combinations of the mobo, ram, and the processor, maybe.

 

[bloghead]

I just remembered something..I changed some things in my cmos which upped my processor clock speed to like 2.0 and it raised the fps by about double. It was still slow though. I guess that one guy is right it could be the rest of my computer causing me problems. I was running the game with everything turned all the way up. Does anyone know what parts of the graphics are effected more by processor speed?

 

[michaelsil1]

Half-Life 2 is very Processor dependent even with the best Video card you'll need to have a CPU that can push up the FPS.

 

[icefenix45560]

its not graphics card....

This is a collection of information on a problem with Half-Life 2 that has plagued many players of this otherwise excellent game. This problem is characterized by a sudden massive drop in frame rate when turning corners or moving into new areas of the game. These drops are usually accompanied by looping or stuttering sound during the frame rate drop which is how most people become aware of the problem. Aside from these isolated drops in frame rate, the game is otherwise perfectly smooth. These sudden drops kill the immersion and lead to a very frustrating experience. Below you will find additional details on this problem, some theories, and all responses from Valve on this problem.


I've collected the following points based on my own experience and the information collected from hundreds of forum posts on this problem.

It occurs on both Intel and AMD CPUs of all speeds.

It occurs on systems with 2+ GB of RAM although it appears to be worse for users with 512MB of RAM or less.

It occurs on both ATI and NVIDIA video cards, including video cards with 256MB RAM.

It occurs with multiple sound cards and chipsets, including the Sound Blaster Live!, Audigy, Audigy 2, NVIDIA SoundStorm, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Realtek, etc.

It occurs after disabling sound in-game, disabling the sound card
in device manager, and even after removing the sound card entirely.

It occurs regardless of in-game screen resolution.

It occurs for both CD/DVD installations and installations downloaded via Steam.

It occurs on all supported versions of Windows including Windows XP Service Pack 2.

It occurs on all supported versions of ATI CATALYST and NVIDIA ForceWare drivers, including the CATALYST 4.12 and ForceWare 67.02 beta drivers that contain optimizations for Source engine games.

There are reports that lowering in-game texture detail and/or sound quality helps. I had to set texture detail to low before I noticed an improvement. This is unacceptable considering my system specs.

This issue is not the result of the in-game auto-save feature as many people suggest. While the auto-saving may cause stuttering, the stuttering also occurs many times between auto-save points.

The stuttering occurs in the same spot every time but only once per the loading of that level. I have recorded a 10 second demo that illustrates this. When executing the demo multiple times, the stuttering occurs every time in exactly the same spot. However, if while the level is loaded, you go back to the location of a previous stutter, it no longer occurs.

According to some, this problem has existed as far back as the Half-Life 2 demos that were shown at E3. Indeed, if you go back and watch some of the footage, you can hear the audio stuttering as new scenes are loaded.

The stuttering occurs in Half-Life: Source which has significantly less resources to manage than Half-Life 2.

Vampire: The Masquerade, which is based on Half-Life 2's Source engine is also reported to have the same stuttering issues.

After doing some extensive testing with the new patch, I have noticed a few things. First of all, it does almost completely eliminate the stuttering on my system. It still stutters during auto-saving, but overall it has been greatly reduced and the game is very playable for me. For NVIDIA video card owners, there is a remaining stuttering problem that is still being worked on and for that reason, the new in game setting that enables the stuttering fix is disabled currently on NVIDIA hardware (see this post by Gary McTaggart).

That being said, I have noticed an intermittent frame rate reduction with this patch. This slowdown is particularly noticeable when looking at scenes with water. If I go into the video settings within Half-Life 2 and make any change that forces a restart of the rendering engine, the slowdown goes away. However in the course of playing through to a new level, the slowdown returns until I force a video restart in game again. In the feedback that I have seen via email and on various forums, this problem is not isolated to my system.

With this patch, Valve added a new console variable, mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware, which controls whether textures are preloaded into video memory during level load. By setting this variable to 0, you end up with same behavior as before the patch. Using Fraps I compared performance with this variable enabled and disabled to illustrate the new slowdown problem.

View Patch Preformance Graphs

Suggested Solutions
The following suggestions come from Gary McTaggart and Erik Johnson at Valve, and from users in various forum posts. While some of these suggestions have improved the situation for some people, none of these suggestions eliminate the problem entirely.

From Valve: Set snd_async_fullyasync to 1 in the console or config file.
From Valve: Lower in-game texture detail and/or sound detail.
Set the -heapsize launch option to half your total RAM. For example, if you have 1 GB of RAM, add the launch option -heapsize 512000. People have also tried other values with limited sucess.
Run dxdiag and lower sound hardware acceleration.
If you are running the 5.1 or 4 speaker settings in Half-Life 2, change the setting to 2 speakers.
Set the snd_mixahead option to various values (0.4, 0.5, 1, 0).
Set cl_forcepreload to 1 and sv_forcepreload to 1.
Set cl_smooth to 0.
Defragment your hard drive.
Diable virus protection applications.
Increase AGP aperture setting in your motherboard's BIOS.
Use ffdshow to disable third-party MP3 CODECs.
Uninstall various third-party CODEC packs.
Remove Half-Life 2 completely and redownload or reinstall it.
To prevent auto-saving, mark the following files as read-only in the hl2\SAVE folder: autosave01.sav, autosave01.tga, autosave.sav, autosave.tga.
Install Omegadrive's modified drivers (Omega Drivers) for NVIDIA and ATI video cards

(taken from http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/