Half-Life 2

What works

• Installing by DVD;
• playing the game;
• changing settings.
  

What does not

• HDR makes the game extremely slow (unplayable, while on Windows on the same computer it plays well);
• the first keypress when starting a new game (ie w to walk or e to activate, etc.) always pauses the game; pressing ESC two times resolves this.
  

Workarounds

What was not tested

Playing the game to the end.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

- The first time the game is started, the resolution is set to 1024x768. The GNOME panels are still visible when you are in the menu. When you change the resolution (in my case to 1680x1050) Episode One appears to hang (or get extremely slow). I need to restart the game and all is well and the new resolution is applied. Also no panels visible anymore. Tested configuration: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Geforce 9800 GT 1GB Driver version: 180.44 3 GB memory

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.