Half Life 2 running slow

Anyone on here play PC games? I recently got a new PC, one that's much faster than my previous one. It's able to play all sorts of graphically demanding games at a pretty decent framerate, but for some reason it has a problem with Half Life 2.

This makes no sense, because my old 1.86Ghz Core 2 Duo machine could run that game perfectly well at 1080p with all of the settings set to the highest level. It doesn't run horrible on my current machine, but it seems to stutter a bit. I mean, my computer runs Portal just fine, so why does it have a problem with HL2?

 

Whats your specs?

 

Core i7-950 3.06Ghz, Radeon HD 5850, 8GB DDR3 RAM, ASUS P6T motherboard.

 

You know there is a help and support forum right? -_-

> Moving topic.

a) drivers
b) full hdd
c) hdd needs chkdsk
d) crappy page file size
e) crappy hdd
f) hdd is failing
g) whacked the settings up high thinking your PC is godly and HL2 is old (swallow your pride and turn it down a notch in all areas)
h) or you WTB a defragment
i) that goat porn you were watching installed a virus
f) you have av running background scan when gaming
g) data excution prevention may hate you, check it is disabled or all facets of valve/steam/HL2 are allowed

Then see how you go.

 

HL2 is old. As I said, I was able to run it with everything at the highest setting on my older, much less powerful machine.

It runs fine if I turn off V-sync, but I hate tearing.

 

It is that kind of mentality which is exactly why HL2 is lagging.

HL2 is old , but the patches arnt.

Your old max settings may be diffrent to your new max settings.

Did your old machine play it at max settings at the same resolution as your current machine?

Did your old machine play it with the same build version?

Swallow your pride and drop the resoluton or even your monitor refresh rate a little, this is the most likely candidate. That or your drivers need updating or rolling back.

If none of the other suggestions made any diffrence we can take it further but not before you have dropped this my old pc crap and actually tried them

 

You failed to mention your Windows version. If your old machine was running XP and your new machine is 7, or worse, Vista, no bloody wonder! They're resource hogs. Plus some games may not be Vista/7 compliant.

Don't forget also that older games may use different graphics standards and there may be some kind of conflict with your current card/driver. Unusual, but it did happen... I remember having to go through hoops to get UT to run satisfactorily on a more modern computer.

I'm afraid LeGIt is right, though. Don't have that mentality. Go down to default settings, turn your v-sync on and see what happens.

By the way, in the old days, you could disable triple buffering (you'd have to do so in your driver config and also the game's config). That said, I think triple buffering was defaulted off in HL2? It would be nicer with triple buffering and v-sync, of course ;-)

 

should be fine on any windows with that spec. Mine works fine with older hardware running on Ubuntu with Wine.

 

And I've seen 20 year old games run like utter hell under Windows 7 despite them running at well over 100fps on XP with lesser hardware!

 

Yup, me too. Remembering I worked in a shop that not only sold games but had a PC department where we built and repaired PCs, when Vista came out it all went to shit and we saw LOTS of games not running well (or in some cases, at all) on PCs that were identical to one we built a few weeks before with XP.

 

In response to your questions: yes, it's running at the same resolution as on my older machine. I'm running Windows 7. I'm not sure if HL2 is the same build version as the one I ran on my older machine. Possibly not, because the version I'm running now has an option for motion blur, and I don't recall that being in the version I used before.

I would consider installing an XP partition on that machine, but one issue is that some modern games won't run in XP. Another issue is that, unless I install the 64-bit version (which supposedly has all sorts of problems) I'd only be using half of my memory.

 

I don't think Windows 7 is half the drain Vista was - I find that my i7 950 with 8 GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 460 runs HL2 faster than my previous machine as far as I am aware.

I would suspect that the issue is down to some dodgy graphics card drivers - I would have no end of issues with slowdown due to poor updates on my old machine, sadly all when using a Radeon.

To confirm whether you've got an issue, try running BurnInTest and confirm your memory, graphics card etc. isn't playing up - also you could try 3DMark and compare your scores with equivalent machines. Aside from that, not much I can suggest apart from ask Valve - they still sell HL2, so their technical support may help you.

 

How is 3.2Gb not enough?!

 

Well to start off, Holy shit, your new PC sounds powerful as hell!

The problem that has already been mentioned is that your PC is just too powerful and is pulling farther and farther away for what HL2 was built for. I have heard many stories of games that should run like silk with these beastly machines that instead run into problems. I am not sure why, but I keep feeling like the main problem is your RAM.

Windows 7 is hardly an issue (and even the fact that it takes up more resources than XP, well yeah, but look at your system! It would'nt matter), and the reason your HL2 has motion blur now is because Valve updated all of their source games to the newest (2009) version of the source engine, again, this wouldn't cause problems but instead should make it run even better!

AMD Athlon X2 2.8 GHz Dual Core
ATI Radeon HD 5570
2 Gigs of DDR2 Ram

and my machine can run HL2 full settings with no stuttering whatsoever. I have heard that more than 3 gigs of ram is the main issue if it isn't a 64 bit operating system. (but I could easily be mistaken)

And at retro saying HL2 doesn't default triple buffering... HL2 defaults to whatever it see's your machine being capable of.

Good luck in finding the problem...
I will say something that might not help, but who knows. I have Dead Space 2 for the pc, and it ran amazingly almost full settings. About 2 days into playing, the game started to have monster lag, and I couldn't find out why. The settings in game were the same as they always were, hell, I even lowered everything to the minimum and it still lagged hardcore.

days later I finally noticed that in the Catalyst Control Center it raised my anti aliasing to something as small as 2x. When I took manual control over this and disabled it completely, Dead Space 2 ran again no problems. I doubt that's your issue, but its worth a shot? I dunno.

Good luck again.:banghead:

Also, you say portal runs good, do you by chance have EP2 to try out? EP2 has Multi-core rendering in the settings which gives the game a big boost of speed when you have more than a single core processor, while HL2 seems to lack this feature. Id like to know if EP2 has the same stuttering. But if it doesn't, they are on the same exact engine, so it still baffles me.

 

Driver issues / background programs

 

It's not Win7 as I run it on my machine and get 50-60FPS.

Specs:
AMD X3 3.42GHz
8 GB RAM
GTX 265 768mb

 

Its probably a setting in ur ATI control panel, try making sure all settings are turned off/"Use Applications Settings"

 

Yeaaah, why on earth would anyone want to use all the resources available on a machine? That just sounds like madness!

Sheesh, get with the 2010s grandpa - 4GB RAM is seen as an average spec nowadays.

 

You should be having absolutely NO problems with that computer. Especially a 5850
below is my computer with similar specs. And I average 259.84 FPS @ 1600x900 on Half life 2 lost coast everything maxed out with 4XAA with the latest patches. I would try running that and see what results you get from it

I am also on Windows 7 ultimate 64-bit. And to those who have never used 7 64-bit I wouldn't talk crap about it. It's faster than XP 32-bit. MUCH faster even without a SSD drive. And it's compatible with almost everything.




Although, how are you running 8GB RAM in tripple channel? That would have to be 3x2.6GB sticks and i'm pretty sure they don't make those

 

For running XP with HL2? That's MORE than sufficient!

If you think 4Gb RAM is average spec, then why does the average PC come with 2-3Gb RAM still, occasionally 4Gb but almost never more than that?

I've been in the industry for over 10 years now. I've built thousands of PCs. We took pride in giving our customers what they needed, not give them what we have regardless of whether it's under or over-specced. We NEVER ripped off a customer and told them they needed more than they did. I think I know how much RAM is sufficient to see a game that I got to see before most people in this country, thankyouverymuch!