playing a game in dx 8.1 instead of dx9

[marty905]

i was just wondering how can you play half life 2 in dx 8.1 if you have a dx9 card like one of the nvidia's....it has dx9 but it would get low fps so how do you change it so you can play half life 2 in dx 8.1 mode?

 

[Asus]

There will probably be a console command or maybe even options in settings.
What card do you have? The 5200 and maybe even the 5600 will run DX8.1 or at least a mixed mode by default.

 

[marty905]

lets say i wanna run other games like that

 

[marty905]

is there a way to change it in the DxDiag thing so that all games run in dx8.1

 

[ewilson248]

DX9 is backwards compatible, and not designed that way, meaning there is no way to switch back and forth from one to the other, unless you want to format your drive and reinstall windows.. the best way is to drop you resolution and turn off all the eye candy until your frame rate comes up. you could try installing DX8 over DX9 but I would not try that unless you had no other choice, it may do some nasty stuff.

 

[filipeg165]

i dont know if that works, cuz i think the game would ask you to install directx 9 again to play wouldn't it? for example, if you're installing far cry, it says: your version of directx is 8.1 blablabla, please install directx 9 to play the game or something, i got that once when installing one game, don't remember which one... anyway, i don't know if you could just stick with directx 8.1, someone correct me if i'm wrong please

 

[Asus]

Yeah, it won't work like that.
HL2 may let you change the path to use by command line but you wouldn't be changing anything with the DX9 path.
Just have to find out.

 

[ewilson248]

yeah, some games REQUIRE a specific version of DX, even if they don't use all the features of that version, if this is the case, you are SOL, just use the version you need to and turn everything down until its playable.. most people use this as a minimum: 800x600x32 at 30 FPS no AA/AF . my preference is 1024x768x32 at 60fps

 

[psyno]

Well, so if a game has multiple modes but provides no explicit way to switch between them, you can still spoof it, like by using 3D-Analyze to launch the game, while providing a PCI/Vendor ID of a card that has the capabilities you want to claim you have.

*edit: this should be unnecessary with HL2.

 

[[Matt]]

You will probably be able to force HL2 to run in 8.1 by adding a command line switch to the games executable shortcut. Halo had several commands that improved performance for DX9 users by forcing the game to use shader model 1.1 instead of shader model 2.0