why doom and halflife 2 run bad

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KingTKS

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 16, 2004
Messages
148
i had a system before that ran doom3 beautifully on medium settings. it had an amd 3200 and 256x2 512 pc3200 memory, radeon 9800 pro
i built a new system and i kept the memory and graphics card but got a pentium 4 lga 3.0 800fsb 1mb L2 cache
now both halflife 2 and doom 3 run sluggish and choppy on the lowest settings. i got new directx and drivers for gcard and still does this. what is going on.
please tell me cause i just got HL2 and i wanna play so bad
thanks
 
Did you format or atleast give yourself a completely clean install of windows?


Windows is all crudded up with the drivers for the old chipset/cpu etc...
 
format
squeaky clean install of 2000 pro
its a new motherboard and i am using the drivers that came with the motherboard. i am thinking it has something to do with the memory not configured right with the motherboard
the games are taking forever to load too.
 
maybe do a bit of overclocking, at least temporarily, to see if the cpu IS the problem, if you see gains, in large quantity if you get enough OC out of it, then its the cpu. Just becareful not to kill it, stay away from voltages above what most are using and u'll do virtually no damage if you're against overclocking, it'll help tell you whats wrong.
 
Find your bottleneck, cpu, ram, or video. Cpu usually bottlenecks from polygons, if your fps drops alot when there are alot of models being drawn its usually cpu, overclock. If its laggy when opening doors / at level begining but then gets a better as you move around the same room it may be ram (Check ram usage, easiest way to rule ram out). Video bottlenecks usually just make it slow in everything. You can try lowering resolution / lowering any gpu program usage (vertex/pixel shaders) and try to reduce overdraw etc.

Oh and be sure you dont have any major problems with your vid card like missing chipset agp drivers. (be sure your not in agp 1x or something dumb like that)
 
what resolution and setting are you playing it at. i noticed it to run choppy on my system with a 9800pro at 1280x1024. i just left it at 1024x768
 
usually the first thing to check is updated chipset drivers. I can tell you that with that setup (except 1GB RAM, I used to have 9800Pro, see sig) I was able to run most games i.e. FarCry and Doom3 just fine on high settings (1024x768, 1AA, 8AF). Your RAM will hold you back in those games b/c you will have stuttering while new textures are loaded. It should be running very close to as smooth as it was on the 3200+ tho.
 
KingTKS said:
format
squeaky clean install of 2000 pro
its a new motherboard and i am using the drivers that came with the motherboard. i am thinking it has something to do with the memory not configured right with the motherboard
the games are taking forever to load too.
Click to expand...

First off you need the latest chipset drivers. What motherboard are you using? If its not an Intel chipset based board that could be one area of suckage.

But by your description of the problem I'd say chipset drivers first.

Secondly Windows 2000 blows for games. Pretty much anything else too. It's just too old now. It's support for hardware and drivers is limited. For example Windows 2000 doesn't even support UDMA 66 transfers for EIDE hard drives. How sad that is. Video performance, especially with ATi drivers vs. Nvidia isn't very good. Even the Nvidia drivers have a marked decrease in performance compared to Windows XP or even the Windows 9x's. It also doesn't take advantage of Hyperthreading and alot of other processor optimizations. In fact you might want to disable HT while using a P4 with Win2k.

Just some thoughts.
 
I'm gonna try the chipset drivers but the motherboard is relatively new so i don't see how that is it. and if my memory handled it amazingly before trust me its fine now. its now my specs 3.0 ghz 800FSB is more then enough to play these games smooth. I know its a configuration problem. for instance i can't tell if dma is going there is an automatic setting in bios then like 30 other options i don't understand. i also can't tell if dual channel is running but i'm presuming it is.
 
KingTKS said:
I'm gonna try the chipset drivers but the motherboard is relatively new so i don't see how that is it.
Click to expand...

Actually that is exactly the problem. If the chipset is newer than the OS, then obviously the OS won't have drivers for that chipset. At any rate, in general it's good to install the latest chipset drivers, instead of using the default OS drivers.
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
First off you need the latest chipset drivers. What motherboard are you using? If its not an Intel chipset based board that could be one area of suckage.

But by your description of the problem I'd say chipset drivers first.

Secondly Windows 2000 blows for games. Pretty much anything else too. It's just too old now. It's support for hardware and drivers is limited. For example Windows 2000 doesn't even support UDMA 66 transfers for EIDE hard drives. How sad that is. Video performance, especially with ATi drivers vs. Nvidia isn't very good. Even the Nvidia drivers have a marked decrease in performance compared to Windows XP or even the Windows 9x's. It also doesn't take advantage of Hyperthreading and alot of other processor optimizations. In fact you might want to disable HT while using a P4 with Win2k.

Just some thoughts.
Click to expand...

Where did you hear all this? Hyperthreading works on win2k, it works on any smp operating system. Sure winxp schedules task switching a little differently to make better use of hyperthreading, but it still works fine. Ive never heard of decreased video performance on win2k, but I would like to see your source. And ive never heard of udma 66, I mean my old hd is working a fast as I expect it to (and ive had it for years), if your looking for hd performance go sata or scsi, or raid some drives together.
 
Sir-Fragalot said:
Secondly Windows 2000 blows for games. Pretty much anything else too. It's just too old now. It's support for hardware and drivers is limited.
Click to expand...
Yeah I kinda want ot know where you're getting this information too. My own persoanl benchmarks show Windows 2000 to be on average 5% faster in EVERYTHING than XP. Same drivers and hardware, same tweaks, everything. I know for a fact that it runs all Quake 3 based games about 10% better. Pifast runs faster on Win2k too. It's also much more tweakable. Check the forums at www.xtremesystems.org they'll tell you that Win2k3 and Win2k are the best OS'es for tweaking. XP has too much overhead compared to 2k.

I'm sorry, but there are a bunch of things that could be the problem, but it's just not the OS.
 
Lord of Shadows said:
Where did you hear all this? Hyperthreading works on win2k, it works on any smp operating system. Sure winxp schedules task switching a little differently to make better use of hyperthreading, but it still works fine. Ive never heard of decreased video performance on win2k, but I would like to see your source. And ive never heard of udma 66, I mean my old hd is working a fast as I expect it to (and ive had it for years), if your looking for hd performance go sata or scsi, or raid some drives together.
Click to expand...

UDMA66 is Ultra ATA 66. That's as high as Windows 2000 officially supports. It doesn't do ATA 100/133 and it doesn't natively support SATA or anything like that. Check benchmarks yourself. Windows 2000 drive benches are crap.

HT works to a degree but not as well as it does in Windows XP. I've worked with both for years and played games on both.

How can you say Windows XP has more overhead than XP? I've run it on two systems that are identical and the Windows 2000 machine felt slower, ran some apps slower and didn't multitask as well with a 2.8GHz HT enabled processor. Also if you actually look inside task manager you'll see that FAR more ram is actually being used when idle on the Windows 2000 system than it is on the Windows XP system.

Microsoft's original plan was to replace Windows 9x with what they called Windows NT 5 (still have a copy of Win NT 5 beta on an MSDN disk) at the time, it was later renamed to Windows 2000. However when Windows 2000 launched it was discovered that it's performance lagged seriously behind Windows 9x, mainly due to companies not having very good experience with making drivers for Windows NT based OS'es.

I'm surprised none of you remember this.

Windows ME was rushed to market after that to fill the gap left in MS's lineup at the time. Microsoft then went back to fix everything that was wrong with Windows 2000

I saw benchmarks back in the day showing that Nvidia cards were 11% slower and ATi cards were up to 44% slower on Windows 2000 when compared to Windows 98SE and Windows ME. I'm sure those driver issues have changed now. But what hasn't changed is Windows XP takes up less memory and runs faster on the same hardware than 2000 does.

What also hasn't changed is Windows 2000's poor disk performance. I work with Windows 2000 servers and workstations EVERYDAY. I also work with some workstations that are identical in hardware configuration to our 2000 boxes and they run XP pro. The XP Pro systems are hands down faster. You can FEEL it. 2000 BTW is SP4 with all the latest drivers and patches. It still runs like ass comparitively.

More configurable? More tweakable? No. I've never seen anything you could tweak in Windows 2K that couldn't be done in XP.

They are practically the same OS. XP has been streamlined and alot of bloat code was removed. Also particular attention was payed to XP's video and game performance vs. Windows 2000 because 2000 sucked compared to 9x. Whereas Windows XP is just as fast as the Windows 9x's and in alot of cases now it's faster.

I've run two Compaq Proliant DL380's, one with 2K server and one with 2003 Server. The 2003 Server machine is faster. Plain and simple. More responsive, boots faster and again uses less memory idle than the 2K box does.

At work I have 30 machines that were all running Windows 2000. Pentium III 866's with Nvida TNT2 M64's and 768MB of PC133 ECC SDRAM. Ultra SCSI 160 Quantum Atlas 10K II's and they were dog ass slow. When you'd click on the start menu you'd get lag before it would pop up. Going into my computer or Windows explorer was laggy. Again the system had the latest drivers and patches.

When I was ordered to install Windows XP on them I was apprehensive as those machines were dogs to begin with. But when I installed XP SP2 I noticed a HUGE speed increase.

I do know some applications specifically liked 2000 better than XP. But newer programs designed for XP should work better on XP. Today is the first time I EVER heard anyone talk about 2000 as a gamers OS.

I admit that what I was saying about the video drivers and performance in Windows 2000 is old news as that was back in the Windows 9x days. It was still the case when Windows XP was first released. I wouldn't think that would have changed now. But I could be wrong. But disk performance blows in 2000. I experience that daily.
 
Lord of Shadows said:
Where did you hear all this? Hyperthreading works on win2k, it works on any smp operating system. Sure winxp schedules task switching a little differently to make better use of hyperthreading, but it still works fine.
Click to expand...

Well, you'd be surprised how much of a difference Win2k and WinXP can make on a HT processor.
Win2k doesn't support HyperThreading as such, it just sees the system as dual-CPU, and runs the software as such (like any regular SMP-OS would do on a HT system). In some cases this can really screw up the caching, because you are trying to run two memory-intensive applications at the same time. So effectively you get half the cache for either task. That's the sort of thing that gave HyperThreading the bad press at first.. in some cases, HT can be LOTS slower than non-HT.
In WinXP you rarely have this problem, since it is aware of the difference between HT and regular dual-CPU, and therefore it changes scheduling to avoid performance loss. You rarely get (significantly) less performance with HT on than with HT off in WinXP.

So, although his other points are a bit far-fetched, he does have a solid point here, sometimes turning off HT can boost performance in Win2k by 40% or so.
 
Fragalot, you get a cookie. I'm impressed with all your OS-dropping and your employment.
I'm an independent contractor-consultant with an MCSE+i from NT4-2k3. I've got my CCNA. I manage and maintain well over 50 networks in the greater Bay Area, CA, so really telling me about OSes you run at work has very little sway. I didn't feel I had to mention that until now.
However, that's beside the point. I'm glad you think that XP 'feels' faster, but my benchmarks show otherwise. Almost all games (and I'm on an Athlon mind you, so I can't know about the P4, or hyperthreading, but I would suspect that since XP has actually HT support that it would be faster, so I concede that point) run faster on 2K. The 'overhead' i was talking about are things like font antialiasing, system recovery, imporoved memory protection for isolated processes, the wireless zero configuration service, and so on. XP is slower becuause it's more stable, there's no doubt about that.
As for disk performance, the point of a driver is to replace the OS native disk commands. This would mean that most OS'es will give the same drive speed given the same driver development and tweaking time. Since both XP and 2k are NT OS'es, there's really not going to be a whole lot of difference in there. As for your comment that it only supports ATA/66, a 10 second google search reveals that It was fixed in service pack TWO Not only that, it supported 66 before that, just not 100, which you originally said then changed your mind.
The original reason for the whole post was your statement that Windows 2000 blows for games, and that's probably not the reason that King's HL2 and D3 are running slow.
 
ok sorry to interrupt the argument but now that i have a ccna guy helping me maybe you'll know whats going on
i updated the chipset drivers and the games still run bad.
what is giong on
thanks
trevor
 
Give me a better description of how bad its running.

You say that "both halflife 2 and doom 3 run sluggish and choppy on the lowest settings" What fps are you getting on avg? When does choppyness occur? What motherboard?
 
King, try running 3dmark versions and see if you get similar results to people with similar systems. They're in no way inidicitive of game performance, but it will tell you if there's a problem with your 3d. Get CPU-Z and make sure you're running AGP 8X. Check that you've got DirectX 9c installed, as both those games run best with it. Make sure you've got all the latest updates, including service pack 4. Check to see if other games (like Farcry if you've got it) run comparatively slower. Use the latest Intel .inf drivers (Chipset identification on Intel's website. Upgrade to NVIDIA's latest driver on their website (I know, not the fastest, but supposedly they will be stable) Turn on AA and AF and see if that lowers it, if it does, it's the video card. If you see not much change, it's the CPU. both of those games run a LOT better with 1gb ram too. Does any of this help?
 
Win2000 blows. I had 2 HDDs in this computer (both 160g Seagates) with Win2000 on one and WinXP on one. Xp Is definitly faster in terms of booting and day to day usage. I never noticed any gain in 2000 with games, EVER. Somtimes I might have gotten a few more FPS in either OS, but simply because more/less shit was installed on that drive that was running in the background.

Show me (us) some screenshots and numbers.

Also, you having all this experience in no way means your right. The bigger Epenis doesnt mean you get bigger numbers in whatever you like. XP>2000.
 
SBA? Fastwrites? Video BIOS caching? System BIOS caching?

Run dxdiag and see if there are any problems. Anything else running slow, or just games?

Make sure your system is clean. Hooking an unpatched system to the internet can be bad.

-dB
 
i understand most of what you guys are telling me to do and i've done most of them. I am going to run the dianostics with directx next
also the arguing over which OS is fast is stupid because you're all running these OS's on different Parts your tests are different and unlsess you have done hundreds of tests with many many systems you don't have room to talk. and the only guy in this forum i will listen to is the guy with the ccna casue i know he knows his stuff. and windows 2000 is better not only because i personally know this for a fact but seeing the posts in this forum the guys who are for 2000 have stuff to back it up and the guys saying xp is faster only say "my system ran xp better then 2000" ok who cares . i have people with 2000 telling me they ran tests to proove this theory of theres. so unless you know what you're talking about don't say a certain os is better then another. i'm just trying to get my games working.
by the way all games run at a much lower performance then they should. and don't tell me that 1 gb of ram may be the problem. that is retarded. 512mb is plenty. even if we weren't talking the lowest settings 512 works fine. anyone who wants to argue this go ahead i guarantee 5 people will throw you down. i know this becasue i have played half life 2. smooth on high settings with 384 pc133 ram. with a geforce 5700 PCI yes i said PCI graphics card. and only 1GHZ. so don't tell me my system isn't powerful enough and if anyone does I will be pissed. it is powerful enough there is bug, misconfiguration, driver problem, or something is broke. thats the only possible answers. now what i need is you guys to help me figure out what it is because i dont' know that much about computers. i just know how to build them. I'm only A+ certified material.
I"m going to run some tests today on the gcard and processor and i''ll tell my results hopefully tonight.

thank you smart people who are for 2000 or give a good argument at least and thank you very much for hleping me everyone.
 
King,
HL2 has a 1.2gHz minimum system requirement. that being said, it's more than highly doubtful that you ran it smooth on high settings with a 1ghz processor, but I digress...
If you've tried all the things we've suggested and they are still not working, perhaps you've got a hardware problem. Go and get WCPUID (www.wcpuid.com) and make sure you're running your 800mHz FSB, and your ram's not running with a divider, and that everything is running the way its supposed to be. Take my 3dmark suggestion and try that, see if your scores are on par. Run other games to see if it's just HL2 and Doom3. Then report back to us.

Tengis, Thank you for making my point. Dropping my education level and experience level were just to make the point that Sir-Fragalot's postcount and work experience level meant nothing. I certainly agree that your job does not indicate your level of technical experience. I work with MANY a CIO that couldn't build their own computer, and I've met some 15 year old technicians that could easily run a huge Internet hub.
As for your comment that XP>2000,
Nobody can just make a blanket statement like that. I could easily say that 98>XP in boot time, or DOS>XP in stability, but those aren't really the whole picture, now are they? www.xtremesystems.org which is not a noobish as the [H]ard|Forum indicates that every hardcore user there uses 2k for their benchmarking. And this is not an OS war here! My tests show 2k to be faster, that's all. I don't feel I need to prove this to you. I run XP on my machine because it's more stable, even though it's a bit slower. I've shown myself enough proof, go take a poll in the 'Operating System' forum if you think I'm wrong, that'll show me!
 
No way in hell is it the CPU. My 3.0E runs HL2 and Doom3 without a hitch at 1600x1200
well doom3 is actually hitch free at 1280x1024.... But this was on a 9800 pro. I would imagine my x800pro would have had doom 3 running hitch free at 1600x1200 too.
 
Stealth5325 said:
Tengis, Thank you for making my point. Dropping my education level and experience level were just to make the point that Sir-Fragalot's postcount and work experience level meant nothing. I certainly agree that your job does not indicate your level of technical experience. I work with MANY a CIO that couldn't build their own computer, and I've met some 15 year old technicians that could easily run a huge Internet hub.
Click to expand...

That's just how internet discussions work, sadly.
When people run out of arguments, they'll try to convince others by their experience, job position, age, or whatever (which you can't verify anyway).
I myself have a technical background (not trying to do any 'education level dropping' here :)), and I like to know why, because everything has a reason. So I want to hear reasons and arguments. "It's like this because I say so" doesn't work for me.
It surprises me how many people don't think like that, and just repeat what others said on the internet.
 
NOT TO JUMP DOWN YOUR THROAT BUT,
you are full of shit if you are trying to say a 1ghz CPU with a 5700 and 384 megs of pc133 can or ever has run hl2 at high settings. That is just a complete lie.
An 1800+ (1.53ghz) with a 9800 pro and 1 gig of ram JUST runs hl2 at 1024x768 with good resolution at high settings.


Also, are you honestly trying to say 1 gig of ram doesnt give you better performance in games than 512? Are you fucking kidding me? That is an easily proveable fact. I dont know what your malfunction is, but how you came up with that statement is beyond me.



HOWEVER, your 3.0 system is MORE than powerful enough to handle these games just fine. You have some other problem, yes I 100% agree with you that most of the people on these boards are idiots and will alway say that you dont have enough power regardless of what you have, but the statements you are making are just plain idiotic.
 
The amount of RAM though a bit of a bottle neck definently is not the problem. I've got 512MB on my XP 3200+ and HL2 runs quite smoothly. Don't get me wrong, there are jitters here and there but it is very enjoyable and playable overall.

Probably already been said but I would clear the CMOS and reset it to defaults.
Maybe the AGP apeture size is set to a really low level? Possibly update the BIOS to the latest version. Dunno if it would help but I'd try everything. Maybe temporarly pull out some of the hardware that isn't needed and see if there is something causing a conflict.
 
My bad that 1GHz system i talked about wasn't perfectly smooth i was just getting annoyed but on that exact system i played it and it was playable. lagged a little at some parts but it played good enough to play the game. and not the highest more like the middle on all the settings.
stilll my point was the idiots saying some of my components weren't enough power you are morons.
if i change to xp it may fix the configuration problem but it will not fix it becasue it is a better OS. i just don't know well enough of what i'm doing with a computer to actually change the settings to make it work.
 
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