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A simple BIOS/driver upgrade wonder

A

aheartattack

Member
Here's my rig:
2.8E Prescott.
MSI 875P Neo FIS2R MB
1 GB DDR-400
MSI FX5900XT 128VTD [128MB]
2x80GB SATA on intel soft RAID


This is over 2 years old. I got Half life 2 and ran it. By default everything was low. Resolution was 640x480. DirectX 8.1 was selected and DX9 wasn't even selectable. Setting higher settings caused hitches. I was sad. Sad and depressed. Just 2 years on a high end system is very low end. I found the FX series is crap as hell for HL2. Damn valve for siding with AMD. Damn DX9 for the 16FP issue or whatever.

My agp driver wasn't all too new[66.xx] and I'd never upgraded the vga BIOS afer purchase. I went to the MSI site, got liveupdate and upgraded the AGP BIOS. Then I got the 91.31 drivers from nVidia. I fired up HL2. Behold, the default settings chosen by the game:

Res: 1280x1024[LCD]
Model detail: High
AA: None [Still]
Texture: High
Water: Simple Reflections
Shadow: High
Filter: Trilinear [It didn't even run on trilinear before the upgrade]
Wait for VSync: Still disabled.
And DX9 was selected with DX8.1 disabled.

I changed AA to 2x and water to reflect all. Ran VERY smoothly. Played for 2 hours, no slowdown. Been doin' it since. Only once the pc hanged when exiting the game. Other than that, no issues.

To be fair, I disabled Norton autoprotect when playing after update. It was running bfore the update. But I doubt Norton would have such a HUGE impact.

I don't know if it was the BIOS flash or the 99.xx drivers. Whatever, they have done magic. My battle to hold out till Vista has renewed energy. I couldn't just upgrade the AGP as my next multi core Vista PC will surely be using PCIE. I guess now I can get that new LCD. 🙂

I'll look at Oblivion next to see if there are any improvements.
 
Not to burst your bubble or anything but it probably was Norton. 🙁 😉 Why not run Norton again during gameplay and then see what happens? That way we can be sure. Yeah on second thought if you hadn't upgraded your drivers for that long that's probably it. I didn't even know they were still improving the FX series performance.
 
Valve managed to optimize the engine enough that FX cards can now handle the Dx9 mode of the Source engine. They took something like an 80% performance hit in Dx9 mode when HL2 was first released.
 
No. Tried with Norton. Still great.
My friends copy of HL2 is old. He bought it some time ago. I just installed it. Haven't done any patches.

The drivers I tried to install before were 71.22. Every time I installed them, I got BSOD. And the drivers are not too small a download on my low bandwidth connection. That's why I hadn't upgraded them. I'm happy I've done it now. 🙂

Maybe the BIO upgrade helped with installing the new drivers. I'll never know. But the 91.31 drivers seem really good (for me anyway).
 
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