I just finished the benchmarking for Part 2 of my Half Life 2 performance guides but I've got to head out to Fairfield to pickup snow tires for one of the cars. I'm hoping to have Part 2 up later this evening; I'll get to it as soon as I return home.

I still have a few screenshots to take, but all of the performance testing is done and things are actually looking quite good for owners of older hardware. More on that later...
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  • walmartshopper - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link

    i've beaten the game and i also experienced the pauses. i narrowed it down to the hard drive, since it only happens during disk access such as saving a screenshot, quicksave, or autosave. it generally paused for about 2 seconds, maybe 5 at worst. originally i had the game on a 7200rpm raid1, then i moved everything to the raptor and defragged, and it helped minimized the pause time. they went from major distractions to minor annoyances. still, i ended up with some messed up screenshots. even on the raptor though, it takes an awfully long time to write a screenshot or an autosave to the disk.
  • Hybris - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link

    Sorry about the typos and hope I don't get flamed for the post above. I too look forward to the article as every other article on Anand, which I've read for years and years. Thank you for the best site ever! I hope you will test the DX7 and DX8 and perhaps do a roundup o the DX9 cards with a low end and a mid end processor like the AMD XP 2500+ and AMD 64 3200+ as well as Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz and Celeron D 2.6 ghz. since I think that is what most people have out there, and it would be useful for them to se the difference of playing this game with old vs. new graphic cards AND processors...
  • Hybris - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link

    Hi Anand, the community realy needs your help.

    If you check theess forum threads http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?...

    http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=9016851

    http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5...



    You will see that I, as well as thousands of others on tottaly different hardware, from DX7 hardware to latest systems with AMD FX53, 2GB ram and GF 6800 Ultra, are having serious stuttering problems with Half-life 2 that makes it nearly unplayable, stutters and freezes up to 10 seconds and some peoples computers even crash, there's threads about this on every halflife 2 forum and noware have anyone come up with a real fix. Valve is working on it, but many people are angry cause this is a huge bug the worst I ever seen on a newly released game.

    When one guy posted that the demo at E3 stuttered as well, I began suspecting that Valve knew this al along and this seems very bad. Some people think it's bad coding as the ram isn't properly used and and swapping to harddrive at every new area and new sound that comes into play, some blames the Miles Sound System, apparently Valve uses dll 6.6a while the latest released is 6.6f.

    The same problem is noticed in Vampire The Masquerade if not as severe.

    Since you are doing articles on HL2 performance, it would be so helpful perhaps iff you could look into this, I don't think the problem is hard to reproduce, even if you often test with the latest processor.

    People have tried everything, from complete system reinstalls, to defragging, bios tweaking, optimizing, changing to every driver out there, and in-game tweaks, some help a little, but for most do nothing.

    Valve has not posted any reply in their own forum www.steampowered.com until just minutes ago, and just that they are looking in to it, seems strange that they could miss a bug that seemingly over tens of thousands people are experiencing on all kinds of different hardware.

    The strange thing is we all thought the forum was down for at least a day or overloaded, because you couldn't get in, but then I and a few others discovered that if you deleted all your cookies you could get in everytime.

    I'm not one to believe in conspiracy etc. but this seems really strange.

    If you have time to look into it, or perhaps know someone that could, I think this is need to be brought out to people through a well respected media like anandtech. You have done so much for us before, and we need your help now, to investigate this strange matter.

    Many thanks in advance...
    /Mike
  • Crassus - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link

    Wow, and my wife told me that in the US snow tires are unheared of and noone uses them. Think I need to have a word with her :c)

    I'm really curious what my Ti4200 will perform like.

    Anyway, keep up the good work. Your site has been my daily dose of sanity during my last big exam 2 years ago, and I look forward to that again this december.

    Cheers from Germany. Take care Anand.
  • Jeff7181 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link

    Were you able to include every card from the Voodoo 2 up to the 6800 Ultra Extreme and x800XTPE like some seem to expect? ;)
  • FlameDeer - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link

    Really anticipating for this review!
    Half Life 2 Part 1 & Doom 3 Series of review are very good!
    Thank you, Anand! Take care. :)

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