Radeon 9600 Pro

I used to have a Geforce4 MX460. No good for HL2, so I bought myself a Radeon 9600 Pro, expecting some serious FPS boostage. I uninstalled the Geforce, rebooted, installed the Ati drivers, and launched HL2.

Now, performance is below expectations. At 800*600, with everything on low settings, I only get 15-10 fps in open areas.

Somebody said there could be a conflict with my old drivers, so I uninstalled the Catalyst drivers, ran some Detonator R.I.P.-tool, and installed my ATI drivers again. Still, no FPS gain.

What could be the problem ?

My system:

Amd 1800XP+
512 Mb of Ram
40 Gb HD
WinXP

Is it only slower than expected in HL2?

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

A good set of drivers for ATI's cards.

Is it only slower than expected in HL2?

No, also in all other games.

Is the fan definately okay? If it was too hot it might throttle back or something.

Have you checked your driver settings? Perhaps some optimisations are disabled in the advanced bit (I'm guessing there is an advanced bit, haven't used an ATI for a few years).

Have you tried forcing it to run in a lower than the max supported DX level? DX8 doesn't look much different to DX9, I can't remember the cvar, but it's possible to force whatever render path you want.

Other than that, I don't really know what to say. You are better off asking on a hardware forum like www.ocforums.com or forums.anandtech.com really.

I think its "dxlevel" or something in the console, and I agree you
should force it down to "81" or "80" as even my parent's 9600XT runs
poorly in DX9. The visual difference is pretty minimal, and the
performance boost should let you run in medium settings rather than
low. Thats assuming, of course, that this is the problem.

EDIT: If it isn't "dxlevel", you might want to try "find direct x"
or some other "find" command in the console, as it will search for your
given term in the available cvars.