Half-Life 2

What works

Everything work with all settings on maximum.

Work with all version of DirectX (7.0 to 9.0).

What does not

Nothing.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Resolutions higher than 1280x800.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Tested with: Intel Centrino Core2 Duo 2.40GHz + 4GB RAM + GeForce 9700M GTS 512MB with nvidia driver 185.19.

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.