Suddenly, AA kills the game...

[siorai]

Last night, I decided to go back and play some HL2 SP. I fire it up, with no changes to the in-game settings and I'm getting hardcore choppiness. I fool around with the settings a bit and find out that if I turn on AA at all, my fps goes from around 70 to around 6. ;(

Now, since I had last played I had upgraded my drivers to the 67.03 Extreme G drivers. No other games have a problem with AA, only HL2. I have since gone back to the 66.93 drivers (used Driver Cleaner as well) I had been using before, but AA still kills my framerates. I have even tried reinstalling Steam and HL2, but it's still crap.

I'm running it at the suggested settings which is:
1280x1024
models - max
textures - max
reflect - world
shadows - high
AA - 4x
AF - 8x
shaders - high
v-sync - disabled

sound is 2 speaker, medium quality, no music

Any suggestions?

 

[StainlessJ-FPGA]

Any suggestions?

Turn off AA.

 

[siorai]

I'm sure you think that you're awfully witty for a twelve year-old, but you're just annoying. Screw off.

 

[DSDchemE]

Like he said, turn off AA. AA (in my understanding, could be wrong) simply draws the scene several times from slightly different perspectives then averages them together. That means with AA x4 the engine (and your graphics card) is drawing the scene a several times for each frame (at those high settings), which will naturally slow down your framerates. If it draws it four times then your frame rate will drop by a factor of four, plus time taken to merge the images.

Again, I'm no graphics expert, and I could be slightly wrong at how AA really works, but that was at least the original method for AA (and the way 3D graphic renderers such as Lightwave and Maya handle AA).

 

[WhiteZero]

At 1280x1024 there are so few jaggies that I don't see how you'd want to sacrafice FPS for it...

I'm sure you think that you're awfully witty for a twelve year-old, but you're just annoying. Screw off.

lol :burp:

Try putting "mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0" (no space in "hard") into the console before loading a game/map.

 

[siorai]

OK, let me explain it as simply as possible for you guys:

AA used to work. Now it doesn't.

See why saying to turn off AA is a kindof stupid response?

This is more than likely due to the recent updates, most likely something to do with the Securom update that just got released. I'd much rather have to put a disc in the drive AND be able to use AA than to not need the disc, but be unable to use AA.

 

[siorai]

At 1280x1024 there are so few jaggies that I don't see how you'd want to sacrafice FPS for it...

lol :burp:

Try putting "mat_forcemanagedtextureintohardware 0" (no space in "hard") into the console before loading a game/map.

It all depends on what you're willing to put up with and the size of your monitor. On my 18" LCDs (equal to a 19" CRT) the jaggies are enough that I want to use AA. I've tried that console command as well actually..

 

[dogboy73]

OK, let me explain it as simply as possible for you guys:

AA used to work. Now it doesn't.

See why saying to turn off AA is a kindof stupid response?

This is more than likely due to the recent updates, most likely something to do with the Securom update that just got released. I'd much rather have to put a disc in the drive AND be able to use AA than to not need the disc, but be unable to use AA.

So it used to work & now it doesn't?

HA HA!!! how's it feel sucker??

Sorry :|

It's just that people who could play the game smoothly gave nothing but a hard time to those that couldn't who complained about it. As such it's impossible to resist a little payback to anyone who had it good but now has problems. Nothing personal.

Anyway, Does the game run smoothly without AA? Chances are it doesn't & you have now joined the ranks of the HL2 wannabe's (i.e. people who really want to play but can't due to problems & bugs in the game). We look for a solution ......... Our impossible search continues

 

[lord dubu]

I don't know anything about your system. But I'm playing on a Dell XPS lap-top, and I found out that I couldn't run AA unless my power-supply was attached. I guess running AA required so much power the processor was draining the battery the second the game started rendering.

 

[siorai]

Anyway, Does the game run smoothly without AA? Chances are it doesn't & you have now joined the ranks of the HL2 wannabe's (i.e. people who really want to play but can't due to problems & bugs in the game). We look for a solution ......... Our impossible search continues

Actually, it runs quite well without AA. Some very minor stutters, but nothing that really bothers me.

 

[dogboy73]

Strange that that this has occured since the update. It would seem that it addressed more than what the news pages on Steam stated. I'm wondering if they tried to sneak in a new fix for the stutter problem as well as the DVD required thing. Who knows. With Steam they can pretty much do what they like I guess. The idea was that updates would be submitted in the background without people even knowing! I find that a bit discomforting especially if it means that more people who didn't have problems are now getting them. It's an ill fated system whatever way I look at it now :-(