laggy HL2

Hey its me Half-dude

Hey all, I just downloaded one of the HL2 preveiw movies

from planet half-life but it lagged alot when I played it.

Does this mean the actual game will lag?

It says that a 700mhz computer will work with it and I have a 750mhz computer, could it be becouse I just have an old graphics card? I have a nivdia card and a G force2

Unless you actualy have a 7mhz cpu, it wont lag the video. Check your not running kazza ( erw ), etc, close that s**t down. and check you have divx / xvid / whatever its encoded in.

Running the video is completely irrelevant to running the game. Why? Well, they didn't ship the engine with the HL2 preview movies - just a movie file. So it's not being rendered in realtime, it's a cut-scene. That said, my impression would be that the movie is easier to run than HL2, so you'll probably have to really cut down on the details to get HL2 to run.

xconspirisist said:
Unless you actualy have a 7mhz cpu, it wont lag the video. Check your not running kazza ( erw ), etc, close that s**t down. and check you have divx / xvid / whatever its encoded in.

actually, they lag on mine also.

i have a 1.4 athlon and a 64 meg card and the video looked to be running at 2000 r_speeds on my system..

its the crummy format used, not the video itself.

also, the formats are not the same, the HL2 runs decidedly different.

do you think Valve will live up to there claim that Half-life2 will run on a 700mhz processor just fine?

I used to play HL1 just fine on my 200mhz, so historically valve has a good basis.

half-dude said:
do you think Valve will live up to there claim that Half-life2 will run on a 700mhz processor just fine?

given an adequate vid card, it should..

yeh, its all about the video card and the ram.

I managed to get it working on a p166 in software mode! :biggrin: It was at 512x300, but it worked!

I find it worrying that your PC lags when playing a video lol! I've been recommended by a mapper who does mapping on HL2 engine not to use any processor below 1Ghz and at least a GF3 card.... Min requirements will look like s**t, so try and upgrade before the release of HL2 (April 2k4?)...

The HL2 videos are compressed in DVD quality Bink format, which is also operating system-independent. So in actuality I feel it was a smart choice... But I guess the player eats more system resources than others. :razz:

lol my friend made a bink video ... it was 155 megs when it could have been around 40 ... but it was 800x600, good quality :biggrin: ... bink is good, valve is cool :biggrin:

except that they spent the last 5 years making just that video ......

i have well over 200 movies,and my share of TV programs, all run smooth as silk, bink did a poor imitation of a high quality movie..

why it jerked, is of no concern to the laymen, the fact that it could have not jerked is..

its almost like the asshole who tells you to get a larger PC so you can run their maps, jeeze if that isn't the pinnacle of arrogance.. the movie could have been made less stressful as well, it was very poorly made.

Er, yes, I do think that if your PC is having trouble running a 'mere' film that it's going to struggle a bit with the full game :razz:

sighs

i hope i get my 2.6 built successfully :/

that way mere films of poor workmanship will not concern me..

the good new is, with my poor 1.4, i can still identify low quality workmanship :biggrin:

if getting a powerful PC means we will lose sight of that, maybe we should keep or older comps :/

<insert Hulk picture>

Orph get the Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton Core), a fairly good mobo (I can suggest a few), a seperate CPU fan and you can overclock to a 3200+ for a fraction of the cost of other systems.

Hey again all,

You guys might think that this is a little extreme but I'm thinking of buying a new Dell desktop with a 2.20Ghz processor which I know is fast enough for HL2 , but my problem is that it only comes with a <SPAN class=title_emphlight>Integrated Intel<SUP>?</SUP>
Extreme 3D Graphics video card and I know some guy said that it should have a G force 3 card. Do the to cards really differ in speed? what I mean is, if I have a Intel </SPAN><SPAN class=title_emphlight>Extreme 3D Graphics card will HL2 be laggy if not what about Call of Duty?</SPAN>

your best bet for a budget card is a radeon 9600 pro. your best bet for money = no option is a radeon 9800 pro.

+ CoD runs fairly well on most old gfx cards. However ive never heard of that one.

all onboard graphics is crap.

1. it doesnt have the cool architecture and drivers that the good cards have, hence you wont be able to do the cool effects in some games, + what cool effects you do have will be laggy as

2. the highest framerate you will get in any game would be around 20.

Do both the 9600 pro and 9800 pro have the free HL2 ticket?

i dearly love my Nvidia card, but i may try a radeon this time since i never tried one since the crappy old 8x days :sad: (its a shame how hard it is to shake bad experiences in cards)

does anyone have a benchmark site that compares the latest radeon cards?

i mean, i am not about to purchase a 300 dollar card blind, i will more likely get a high quality older model, but i would like to see where that line is, say the older 7500 maybe?

but i would like to see how the versions compare.. also it couldn't hurt to compare them to my Nvidia, i am really leaning toward the 5200, i just like Nvidia's..

Orph, right now the bunch of higher end Radeon cards have been beating the crap out of Nvidia cards. Especially in Dx9 applications. Personally as soon as Nvidia stopped making the cards with Ti versions it all seemed to go downhill and I'm no longer a customer of theirs if I can help it.

does this mean the only two big guys are Nvidia and Radeon now?

since i have only ever had PCI slotted cards i am at the mercy of the advice i recieve from you all..

i had early ATI cards and got burned, i loved GeForce, and my Voodoo banshee card was killer 4 years ago.

are there no other choices besides Nvidia and Radeon now?

ATI and nVidia have been the only players for a while. There is some new XGI or something coming out which is meant to be good, but it will probably end up like all the other chips that came out and were gonna be amazing, e.g. matrox and kyro2. I agree that the 9600 or the 9800 are the way forward right now, and it takes allot for me to say that because I used to hate ATI (like you Orph, mainly becasue of all the driver problems they used to have). I plan to get the 128 meg 9600 card... it's about ?100 now, probably cheaper by the time hl2 comes out. Orph, if you need convincing to buy an ATI card, check this out http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863 :smile: Both cards come with HL2, if you get the XT version, which at the moment is about ?30 more, so it seems to me you basically pay for the game, and get a small performance increase at the same time.

You could get a Barton 2500+, and overclock it to a 3200+, but it still wouldn't be as fast as what you could overclock your P4 2.4/2.6C to http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1834 http://firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_pentium_4_3.2_review/ . AMD were better before the 800MHz 'fsb' P4s came out, but not any more. The Barton 2500+ might be cheaper than the P4 2.4, but the P4 is better :razz:

Watching the hl2 movies is jerky and lame on mine as well, all thanks to the supreme pile of poo that is apple quicktime.

And eat this DesPlesda! I ran HL on a 486 (serious). It ran at about 1 or 2 frames per second in 320*240 with the screen size set to minimum, taking up less than a quarter of the screen. Oh and it took about 5 minutes to load :smile:

I wont buy another ATi card, unless they are the only ones left to buy.. and then I may just stick to my old technology.

I have been loyal to nVidia, for many reasons, the main one is, I truely believe they have a better product, better drivers, and more customer support.

Orph, pretty much, there are alot of smaller ( no name ) cards out there, and I hear some of them are great.. One warning never buy a KYRO chip set... SHUDDER... that has to be the worst. ( I know I have 1 of thier cards )

Bench Marks, dont sway me.. they are pretty close, one set of driver and this one is on top, 2 weeks later the other.. Buy what you feel is the best card for you and the one you can afford.

If you like nVidia, buy them, if you like ATi, buy them.. or research one of the other cards out there and see if it has something your looking for.

Your good at researching stuff Orph, and I am sure no matter what it is you get, you'll be happy with your purchese.

($)

P.S. Orph I saw a ATi 9600 card at Wal*Mart for under a hundred bucks.

The Kyro 2 was a good card, it beat nvidia and ATI cards of the time while running at a lower clock speed, but it was easily beaten by the next generation of nvidia/ati cards, and kyro never made another card. Of course you wouldn't buy one now because they are 2/3 generations old... Moneyshot the hl2 benchmarks I linked are not irrelevant at all - nvidia does not have a proper directx 9 path, so allot of the effects in HL2 are done in a sort of botch job way - if you take a look you will see that the ATI cards do much better than the nvidia ones, and this is a physical limitation of the nvidia hardware, not something that a new driver can just magically fix. And anyway, there has only been one time where the performance has increased significantly due to drivers and that was two years ago...

If I have a 2.6 Ghz processor but a old Gforce video card do you guys think that HL2 and call of duty with run like silk?

No. Get a Radeon 9600 (around $100/?100).

lol my comp is 2.6ghz except its got geforce 4 mx 440 ... tis crap. if you want good performance in hl2, cod, etc, get a radeon 9500 + :wink:

i'm getting the radeon 9600 pro with 256 mb of memory ... haha jeff :razz:

but it doesnt make that much difference in performance, im just getting it coz it's around 5 pounds more

Get the Radeon with 128Mb of RAM, not the 256 version unless you like to waste money. It's a complete waste, it's sort of like the P4EE, it's extra crap that's a lot more expensive that you won't use until a point in time where a better chip/card exists. But if you really have tons of money to blow then go right ahead.

well actualy its a G-force 2

On the 9600 you only pay ?10 extra for an extra 128 megs of memory...