Half-Life 2

What works

* Installing the Game via Steam

* HDR seems to work

* It's more or less fluidly (execpt of the part in the reactor control room)

What does not

* The part in the reactor control room is unplayable, because it's very slow (~1 FPS)

Workarounds

What was not tested

* beating the game - I stopped playing in the underground car park
* I tested with -dxlevel 90 only

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

In case the game experience a huge slowdown to around 0.5 FPS, most probably you had hit so-called "some other (close) place displayed on the screen" bug. First time you may hit it is in the reactor room just before raiding down on a lift to the core chamber. There would a big screen displaying various parts of the reactor core room. This screen is the bug-trigger.

It was reported that the bug occurs only in case the "Offscreen Render Mode" is set to "backbuffer". To workaround the bug simply set ORM to "fbo" (or "pbuffer", if your GPU supports it) and the FPS will raise back to a playable values.

Keep in mind that setting ORM to anything other than "backbuffer" will break the game shaders dealing with refraction (water and alike) when the AA is on. Another unfortunate effect of setting ORM to "fbo" is that the performance level when using dxlevel 90/95 in Non-HDR mode will be very low, especially in areas where there are a lot of refracting surfaces. For now it seems that the best choice would be to turn off AA, set ORM to "fbo" and switch the game to the dxlevel 81 before entering the bug-triggering area. After successfully passing it redone the changes back to gain more FPS or better quality graphics.