Wednesday, December 19, 2007

More performance reports

I already told you that I got Half-Life 2 working on my computer, but I will fill you in on the details. First of all, I don't get the pretty water reflection effects that you see in screenshots and stuff because my graphics card is a MX model of the Geforce2 and does not support pixel shading required for water reflections on Half Life 2 and Morrowind. It's okay though since it looks okay but slightly outdated (Think Ocarina of Time) without the reflectivity added by pixel shading.
Now that we got that out of the way, the textures don't look good (about PS2 quality) when I set them on low so I usually set them on medium so they look substantially nicer than with low. This has a small performance hit, but it is worth the prettiness. High textures is too far and lags a lot. Also, I don't see any difference between high shader effects and low shader effects so I just keep the shader effects on low for possible performance reasons.
As for the FPS (frames per second) I get usually 5-10 fps outside in high poly areas such as the open areas in the beginning of the game. This increased to about 8-13 in areas that have less polygons and around 15 fps in areas that are enclosed with a low amount of polys. I am just guessing the fps because I am too lazy to look up the fps counter console command, but I can estimate about how many fps an animation is because I used to feverishly check the fps counter on World of Warcraft to compare the best combinations of performance and quality.
I think I am about 2/3 of the way done with the game now, I am at the part where you fight all the enemy soldiers by setting up turrets (I can't get past it yet) and am dying alot.. on easy... but that's just because I suck at first person shooters. :P

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