Matrox G400 + HalfLife (sigh)

[Dirk the Daring]

Howdy. My first post, and I'm sorry it isn't a good one.

I spent the last week going through this board trying to increase my frame rate on Half-Life. I've used the matrox tweak
utility to remove vertsyc, and overclock to
110%. I've used "kruzin'"s config. I've updated my AWE64's drivers. I've re-installed windows. I've updated to Dx7. I managed to get my framerate up to 17-20FPS during normal play, and 13FPS during the blowout demo. I wasn't happy, but I survived.

Then a friend of mine got an identical system with a VooDoo3-2000 for half the price of my G400 (except the system has less RAM) and got 40-50FPS during normal play... Without any tweaking at all.

Needless to say, I've become a bit upset. My system listing is below... I'd love to hear some possible solutions. Every one of my machines runs on Matrox, but if the performance is that much better for that much cheaper, I may be forced to switch.

Quick responses would be appreciated-- I'll be buying new parts for various machines this weekend.

My system:
----
K6-400
P5BV3+ B Motherboard (BIOS updated last week)
G400 (basic)
96 MB ram (my friend's machine has 32!)
AWE64
Netgear FA310TX (100bT network)

[Daniel Fazekas]

Uh, I have to say I'm quite a bit surprised ever since I put a G400 32MB SH OEM into one of my machines. I have read everywhere how bad Half-Life performance is with the G400, how many graphical glitches are there and so on.

I even saved Kruzin's customized HL custom to have it at hand when it came to installing the card.

Guess what, Half-Life is about the fastest Id Tech engine game on the G400. So what about the glitches? None. Everything is just perfect at 1152x864, without any config file tweaking.

I do have a P3-500 and use the TurboGL, however.

(A friend of mine has a Rage128 in his P3-500, and he does experience some flashing graphics in HL. Not to mention it is slower than the vanilla G400.)

The MAX is arriving just today for my primary system. I can hardly wait to get it running.

I'm quite sure your problem is the K6-400. Until Matrox releases some new drivers, the G400 isn't doing much good for people without an Athlon or Pentium III processor. (And it is somewhat annoying to reboot to Win98SE any time I want to play a 3D game. Let's hope there will be a TurboGL for us Windows 2000 users soon enough, or any support for D3D/OGL for that matter.)

I suppose you already have the latest Half-Life patch installed.

If those various machines are going to run Win98 and have a K7/P3 inside, go with the G400. Otherwise you should seriously consider getting something else.

[Kruzin]

Well, my lowly P2-450 (@512) does pretty good in HL with the regular ICD. Joel also plays on his K6-2, and has no complaints. Ceratinly not blistering fast, but I am able to keep above my fps_modem setting (either 25 or 30, depending on how bad the net is lagging that night). I run at 1152x864. Dropping to 800x600 makes it very quick in single player mode.

Obviously, you have seen my configs. The one most important part of that config file is the line:
gl_texsort "1"
If this line is not there, it will crawl.

This line needs to be in at least 2 of three places. Either in the HalfLife\Valve\autoexec.cfg file or the HL\Valve\HW\opengl.cfg file. It also needs to be in the autoexec.cfg file in any mod's directory (TFC, CS, etc...)