Hello guys,

I was just trying to run halflife 2. It runs great! Except for one thing. When I go to the graphical-settings menu, and adjust some things, and click on apply... Windows gives some major error. Kabaaaam, halflife 2 knocks to the desktop. Is this because of the voodoo card, or is there some directx fix, driver fix or something to fix that? It's the halflife 2 demo.

this is a known problem.many cards that are not officially supported can run HL2 fine,but will always crash when trying to change the advanced settings.that means you cant set the details to low (to gain some FPS).I have created a small workaround,see my last post here: http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1129&whichpage=40

Thx! I was afraight you would tell me the specs couldn't go higher. And you did. But i still have one question, one you might know yourself. Is it possible to use more than 256x256 texture resolution by adding some line in the cfg file?

Quote "DirectX 6: This is the extreme low end. DX6 cards running Half-Life 2 will look a lot like HL. Textures are only 128x128 or 256x256. Everything will look very nasty. TNT2, ATI Rage, S3 Savage, Voodoo3, Matrox G200, motherboard integrated graphics." from www.techimo.com

The voodoo 5 can do 2048 x 2048. So is that possible, or are we limited forever to this direct x 6 thingie? Thx again.

not sure.in theory,higher texture detail (in the advanced options) should rise the texture resolution as well,but the directx6 mode probably wont allow higher texture resolutions.there might be a var that can force texture resolution no matter what,but working envvars for certain games are hard to find (I had to pull the HL2 vars in that cfg file out from my registry,because nobody was able to help me with it on the useless steam forum).anyway,I can create a cfg file that will set the texture detail to "high",you can try it and see what happens..

If you can do that for me , that would be great. I'll see what you will come up with. Thx

ok,download this file and put it into your CFG folder (under steam\blahblah\HL2) (this will run HL2 with all settings at "LOW"),and if you want to set the texture detail to "HIGH",edit the file and change mat_picmip 2 to mat_picmip 0,and launch the game..

here are descriptions of some other commands as well:

mat_picmip  (texture detail.2 is low,1 is medium,0 is high)
mat_reducefillrate  (shader detail.1 is low,0 is high)
r_rootlod  (model detail.2 is low,1 is medium,0 is high)
r_shadowrendertotexture  (shadow detail.0 is low,1 is high)
r_waterforceexpensive  (water detail.0 is low,1 is medium/high)
r_waterforcereflectentities  (set this to 1 if you want water detail at high,set it to 0 for medium.r_waterforceexpensive must be set to 1 for this setting to have effect)

Thanx a lot! I will try it immediately. You will hear of me soon!

[edit] That autoexec file of yours worked! Texture resolution is at it's highest level! You can see the Voodoo 5 having a hard time with it, but it's beautifull to see . I've found a site with more commands, http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?t=71210 . Here you can set halflife 2 to direct x 9.0 in advanced options! And it works :>. Thx for the file![/edit]

nice find..but you cant set a dx level than is not supported by your card.this was meant for lowend dx9 cards (such as fx5200 or similar),running a lower dx level will improve performance.

I know, it's just that I like to see how far the Voodoo 5 can go in beauty. That's why I wanted to have a better texture resolution. Just to see the beauty of what he's capable of. I don't even mind how slow he is, halflife will always be unplayable on my machine like it is now.. Thx