Why cant I play HL2 on higher settings?

[Ace No-Money]

Man I just bought a radeon 9800pro and 1GB of ram and i still cant play HL2 on higher settings!

I get lag during explosions and extra audio sounds like when people talk in the game. This is with medium settings, and no AA/AF. Urrrr this makes me mad!

What do i upgrade now?

I'm thinkin' about going to Athlon 2600+ Mobile and clocking @ 2.2GHz (11 * 200)

- Thanks!

 

[Stupid]

i had pretty much what u have right now and used to be able to run:

1280x1000
aa 4x
af 6x

all highest settings
except vsynch off
and reflect world

 

[Codeine]

Well the 9800 pro isent near the best video card. HL2 Demands the best video cards. I would of personally just got the 6600 GT. Is your processor OC at all?

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

I know that when you install HL2 it sets up the game to your system. Maybe you have to reintall it to have it change to your new hardware. I have never had to do this, because I havent changed my hardware after installing HL2. Nor have I played around with the settings, I am content with what they were at.

 

[Ace No-Money]

I have overclocked my cpu alot (my highest to run benchmarks was like 2.4GHz), but I don't notice much difference in performance. My mobo Northbridge fan is out, could that hurt the overall performance???

I can run CSS at High settings with 2x or 4x AA/AF and get over 65fps atleast!

What's the deal with HL2?

 

[4W4K3]

If you are running your system all stock then i'd say getting lag at ALL highest settings is expected. The 9800PRO isn't the fastest card, and even overclocked it isn't a 100% guarantee to run HL2 full blown. 1GB of RAM is good, that's not your problem. A stock XP2500+ might be somewhat of a bottleneck though.

If you do buy a 2600+ Mobile chip...2.2GHz should be a walk in the park. Even with stock cooling 2.4GHz was easy for me and temps were 40C range. I'd go more than 2.2GHz if recommended specs for processor are 2.0GHz i believe (for HL2).

 

[Wall7486]

Half-Life 2 uses the next generation gaming engine. If you want to play at higher resolution, I suggest you get a Ati x800 at least. Half-Life 2 is processor intensive and graphic intensive.

 

[Nubius]

Yeah the 2600+ XP-M at 2.2GHz won't make a significant impact or anything and you can easily hit beyond that. I'd say the fact your 2500+ is running at 333FSB is your main problem there

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

my buddies got a 2500, 9800pro and 512ram and i think that he just runs it at 1024x768 with aa and af on at like 4 or something and it runs great.....i'm sure that he cranked it higher to like 1280 and said it was as high he could play without problems...higher it would run, but do the whole laggin'; thing

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

You guys forget that is lower peformance than it should be. 9800 Pro was MADE for hl2, and goes par to par with the 6600GT for HL2.

I would try reinstalling windows if you did any recent hardware changes, or maybee it's just time to reinstall windows.