zmatt
The Bulldog
- Messages
- 4,660
- Location
- In an empty Ramen packet
So as many of you know, I have butted heads with several tech forums members lately over the relevance and quality of Half Life 2 and the games that are derived from it. In all fairness I haven't played the game since 2006, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and see how things have changed. As we all know, Valve has been slowly updating the Source engine over the years to try and keep it up to date. I reinstalled HL2 and steam and played the game to see how it is, 5 years later.
My specs are:
e7200 OC'ed to 3.8ghz 24/7
4gig OCZ golds DDR2 1100mhz
CF Radeon 4850s
catalyst 9.4
Vista 64bti SP1
HL2 is up to date, naturally, since steam forces you to update, so there isn't any trouble there.
I ran the game completely maxed out at 1680x1050. All settings on as far as they would go. HDR is enabled, and AA and AF are their max.
The first thing I noticed was the game was really easy to max as expected and that this really wasn't going to stress my rig. The second thing i noticed was, the source engine did not like high fps, or at least high fps in crossfire setups. I was getting terrible tearing and clipping, to the point that it detracted from the game greatly. I enabled fps sync and it leveled out at 60fps. Problem solved.
The next thing I noticed was that lighting has taken a turn for the worst. Shown here, **** glows.
I didn't notice this until I met Alex, and I don't recall if it was happening before then.
The glowing stops once you get close to the objects. I messed with every graphical setting and nothing fixed this. I can only assume its a problem between then engine and the video card drivers. I have heard that some other Valve games have had issues with ATI cards lately following an engine update, so in that context it makes sense that there are issues. Valve needs to get on this.
You will also note that there are a lot of "jaggies". Remember I had AA and AF maxed. Shouldn't everything be smooth? I went into catalyst and forced AA, AF and Adaptive AA to 16x. The jaggies went away. but everything still glows. I'm going to look into this glowing issue and see whats up. It really ruins the game.
With Catalyst AA and AF. Things are smooth. Notice how close I am. Any farther and the support beam would glow.
A room shot with Catalyst AA and AF. Glow is there, but atleast things are smooth now.
Conclusion:
Well, I'm not sure what Valve did to the steam engine but that glowing issue annoys the **** out of me. This only happens in Source games so the culprit is the source engine. If anyone has a solution I'm all ears. Looking past the graphical issues, the game doesn't look all that great. With HDR enabled I never once noticed it. Other HDR capable games take advantage of it and there are many bright and reflective surfaces, the benefit of this is debatable but it stands that HDR is under used. As for Anti Aliasing, its completely useless. It reminds me of Halo in this sense. In Halo, the only way to smooth things out was to raise the resolution, AA had 0 effect. The same is evident here. Disabling AA and AF had no noticeable effect. For all intents and purposes AA and AF in HL2 is broken as things stand now. One improvement i did see that I forgot to mention earlier was soft shadows. HL2 didn't ship with soft shadows and they are a fairly new thing. If you look through the glow, you can see that many of the objects do have them. In this regard they did improve. However that doesn't make up for its shortcomings. I have to say, I really enjoyed the game more in 2006, when there weren't any show stopping issues. I bought the game with CS:S in 2006 for $20 in a brick and mortar store. I just checked the STEAM store. HL2 by itself cost $20. Considering the age of the game, and the newly made bugs I wouldn't pay $20, not until they fix these issues at least.
My specs are:
e7200 OC'ed to 3.8ghz 24/7
4gig OCZ golds DDR2 1100mhz
CF Radeon 4850s
catalyst 9.4
Vista 64bti SP1
HL2 is up to date, naturally, since steam forces you to update, so there isn't any trouble there.
I ran the game completely maxed out at 1680x1050. All settings on as far as they would go. HDR is enabled, and AA and AF are their max.
The first thing I noticed was the game was really easy to max as expected and that this really wasn't going to stress my rig. The second thing i noticed was, the source engine did not like high fps, or at least high fps in crossfire setups. I was getting terrible tearing and clipping, to the point that it detracted from the game greatly. I enabled fps sync and it leveled out at 60fps. Problem solved.
The next thing I noticed was that lighting has taken a turn for the worst. Shown here, **** glows.
I didn't notice this until I met Alex, and I don't recall if it was happening before then.
The glowing stops once you get close to the objects. I messed with every graphical setting and nothing fixed this. I can only assume its a problem between then engine and the video card drivers. I have heard that some other Valve games have had issues with ATI cards lately following an engine update, so in that context it makes sense that there are issues. Valve needs to get on this.
You will also note that there are a lot of "jaggies". Remember I had AA and AF maxed. Shouldn't everything be smooth? I went into catalyst and forced AA, AF and Adaptive AA to 16x. The jaggies went away. but everything still glows. I'm going to look into this glowing issue and see whats up. It really ruins the game.
With Catalyst AA and AF. Things are smooth. Notice how close I am. Any farther and the support beam would glow.
A room shot with Catalyst AA and AF. Glow is there, but atleast things are smooth now.
Conclusion:
Well, I'm not sure what Valve did to the steam engine but that glowing issue annoys the **** out of me. This only happens in Source games so the culprit is the source engine. If anyone has a solution I'm all ears. Looking past the graphical issues, the game doesn't look all that great. With HDR enabled I never once noticed it. Other HDR capable games take advantage of it and there are many bright and reflective surfaces, the benefit of this is debatable but it stands that HDR is under used. As for Anti Aliasing, its completely useless. It reminds me of Halo in this sense. In Halo, the only way to smooth things out was to raise the resolution, AA had 0 effect. The same is evident here. Disabling AA and AF had no noticeable effect. For all intents and purposes AA and AF in HL2 is broken as things stand now. One improvement i did see that I forgot to mention earlier was soft shadows. HL2 didn't ship with soft shadows and they are a fairly new thing. If you look through the glow, you can see that many of the objects do have them. In this regard they did improve. However that doesn't make up for its shortcomings. I have to say, I really enjoyed the game more in 2006, when there weren't any show stopping issues. I bought the game with CS:S in 2006 for $20 in a brick and mortar store. I just checked the STEAM store. HL2 by itself cost $20. Considering the age of the game, and the newly made bugs I wouldn't pay $20, not until they fix these issues at least.
