Crappy Half-Life performance??

[madmax05]

Sheesh - this is what I am afraid of - Buy a $250 graphics card that won't handle some of the current crop of games - I LOVE Half-Life and Unreal. They play well with my voodoo2 SLI, but I keep hearing about better colors and better quality images - My framerates are fine - I have no idea what they are, only that these games play silky-smooth now. Luckily, I can keep my voodoo2 SLI along with the G400Max, but if I am having to choose the voodoos too much of the time, I am going to be PISSED!

I realize that it may be the way the game is coded that makes it difficult to create drivers that run the game well - but I DON"T CARE! Matrox needs to get together with Valve and GT (Unreal) and figure out some combination of game patches/drivers to make the damn things work!!

Ahhh . . . I feel better now (venting always helps)
P3-450; Abit bx6rev2; ATI Rage Pro; voodoo2 8mb SLI; sbLive; Monster Sound; 128mb CAS3 PC100 Ram

[Nuno]

Well, about Half-Life, I seems to be a matter of OpenGl driver tunning in texture management (I hope). When it was out, plenty of video cards had problems with it.

About Unreal, sorry, but it is a glide-only game, poorly hacked to run direct3d, a an opengl renderer as a joke. So that´s a bad example... What is so funny is that even a glide wrapper (like in those CL tnt2 unified drivers) runs the stuff faster than the d3d in-game support!

[Chris H]

Half-Life (and TFC) runs fine on my machine in D3D and looks quite good too. I haven't got a G400 yet but I would choose G200 or G400 over a Voodoo2 for Half-Life every time. It may be quick but the picture quality of the V2 is poor in comparison

K6-III 450, Marvel G200 8MB, 128MB RAM, SBLive, etc

[Genom]

I hate to say it, but I never have been a 3dfx fan for the msot part, but I would not choose a G200 to play half-life over a voodoo, even a voodoo2. I would prefer in that extreme case to have a fast, so-so image quality than a pretty slideshow. This is just me, I have a G400 and it's pretty good. I realize that Half-life performance isnt up to speed yet mainly cause of the ICD.

I know lots of people here say HL on a G200 is perfectly fine, but like I said in another post, if your used to a faster frame rate then drop, it is very hard to play.

[Habig]

Using D3D, half-life plays ok if a bit slowly (K6-2/300, G200 16MB SGRAM). I'd like to try using the 5.13 openGL drivers to see if those are faster. However, if I choose openGL instead of D3D in half-life's video mode configuration menu, the game happens in a 640x480 section of my screen with the normal windows desktop around the margin (but untouchable - this isn't simply a window). Note that I'm trying to choose 800x600, dunno why it's deciding 640x480 has anything to to with things.

Any ideas? Is this a half-life problem or a matrox driver problem?

thanks,
Alec

[Nuno]

And HL is not the best example to show a video card performance, it´s just too CPU limited, with all that polygon count and skeletal animations. My G200 (PD 5.13) did 25-26 fps 800x600x16 (blowout demo) in opengl, trilinear filtering on. A voodoo2 would do it in the lower 30´s I guess.

[Nuno]

Habig:
What Half-Life version are you using? I am using 1.0.1.0 (with team fortress), and with the 5.13 ICD I can switch resolutions very smoothly.

[Tn]

Half-Life was built around beauty more than speed so I would definitly choose G200 over a Voodoo card. It would be nice to have more frames on online play but that is what the g400 is for. Oh, and I heard that the newest Voodoo drivers had texture probs with HL too.

[Habig]

I'm using the latest version Sierra's auto-update gives me.

Problem solved though - I reinstalled the opengl32.dll in \windows\system, and can now switch back and forth between D3D and OpenGL. with no weirdness.

Time to run some demos and see which works better!

Alec

[GehRehmee]

The reviews I've seen say the G400 is very CPU-dependant...
It seems to follow that mixing the G400 with a game that's very CPU-dependant would lower the time Matrox's drivers have to work...

(/me does the dance of joy... local retailer says max's may be in there as soon as next week... yea canada!)

[Shane]

HL plays nicely on my PII-300 and 8Mb Mill G200 SGRAM.

I can't imagine the G400 would'nt.

?