Half-Life 2 - Radeon 9800 pro - System bottlenecks?

[Ace No-Money]

i just bought a radeon 9800 pro so I could play HL2 at supposedly high settings. Now I have ended up playing at 800x600 and reccomended (medium) video settings. I STILL GET LAGGY on explosions and sudden noises! I'm very frustrated. Why is it doing this? My radeon 9800 pro gets about 5100pts in 3dmark03.
Do I have any large system bottlenecks?

I get 90fps in Counter Strike Source Stress test at these settings!

AWWW! SCREAM!!

 

[DyNaStY336]

HL2 is very CPU intensive so im guessing that is your bottle neck and maybe the 9800 pros just dont do good on that game im not sure of how they perform and it and also you could probably use a gig of ram, and make sure you have no programs running in the background.

 

[Chankama]

I played HL2 (single player mode) on one of my friends computer. He has a 9800 pro. And his system is a old Pentium 4 1.8 GHz (I think) overclocked to 2.4 GHz. I played on 1024x768. And I experienced absolutely no problems. Pretty similar system to urs. As the poster above said perhaps you shud check out 1GB of RAM?..

On a side note, why did u purchase 2x256 of ram???.. Kindda screws up future expandibility no?.. I would've gone with 1 stick of 512 to keep my options open - even if it's "slightly" slower than 2x256.

 

[VIII]

hmm.. cranking up my res to 1280x1024 actually improved my game... lol.. i actually got past 200 FPS in some random location everything maxed (looking @ a wall )...
as for ur bottleneck, id say maybe ram... hl2 takes up like 300meg of ram when open.. the 9800pro is a good card but its not really up to Half life 2 Full Quality... try reducing the AA n the AF and u should have no problems