Half Life 2, Episode 1 starts running slow in-game
I'm playing Half-Life 2, Episode 1 on a mediocre laptop. Half Life 2 ran perfectly after tinkering with the video settings. I understand that Episode 1 is more demanding on the graphics.
The problem: after a few minutes of playing, without any issues, the game slows down and movements become jittery.
In earlier Half Life 2 games it would either run, or it wouldn't - making tinkering easier.
As of now, it seems that something during game playing goes awry and slows the game suddenly down. It doesn't happen gradually; somehow, at a given moment, it just jitters and abruptly slows down to an unacceptable level. It happens indoors, outdoors, enemies coming in or not, i.e., randomly in terms of game location. It seems to happen often after 5 minutes of game play or so. But sometimes it keeps on running smoothly longer.
I did tinker around somewhat with the texture detail and water reflections because I'm aware they are over the recommended settings. I also shortly tried disabling HDR and enabling bloom (whatever that may do), but troubleshooting is difficult due to the delay of the problem onset and sometimes randomness of slowing.
Any ideas what to do? Especially my knowledge on anti-aliasing and filtering is very poor and the game doesn't recommend settings for these options. I copied the settings from half-life 2 to Episode 1. Somehow the Radeon software suggested settings for HL2 that worked like a dream, but I can't get the Radeon software to work anymore. So I copied the settings from HL2 to Episode 1, in lieu of something more constructive.
laptop specs:
- AMD quad-core 1.8 GHz
- 8 GB RAM
- Radeon R7 M260 (2 GB)
- OS: Windows 10
- Advanced Systems care to shut down background processes
- When starting game, 2% processor power and ~20% RAM used up
In-game video options:
- running game under Steam client
- resolution: 1920 x 1080* (native full screen)
- model detail: high*
- texture detail: very high
- shader detail: high*
- water detail: reflect all
- shadow detail: high*
- color correction: enabled*
- anti-aliasing: 4 x MSAA
- filtering mode: anisotropic 6x
- wait for vertical sync: off*
- motion blur: disabled*
- multicore: on*
- High dynamic range: full*
- bloom: off
*: recommended setting
Best Answer
Here's a guess: the game is either running on, or being switched to, your integrated graphics card.
As a debugging step can you try disabling the Intel HD video card you probably have as a GPU under Device Manager? Reboot and try again. You'll lose some features like brightness control in the process.
Pictures about "Half Life 2, Episode 1 starts running slow in-game"
Why are my games running at low FPS all of a sudden?
In some situations your CPU may slow down while you are playing a game. This can be caused by overheating, or it can be caused by attempts to conserve battery power. Sudden slowdowns \u2013 where the game is running fine and then the frame rate drops quite suddenly \u2013 are sometimes caused by these CPU slowdowns.How do I fix Half-Life lag?
Try these fixesWill Half-Life 2 run Episode 1?
Can I Run Half-Life 2: Episode One? The minimum memory requirement for Half-Life 2: Episode One is 4 GB of RAM installed in your computer. An Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU is required at a minimum to run Half-Life 2: Episode One. Provided that you have at least an NVIDIA GeForce 510 graphics card you can play the game.How many hours does Half-Life 2 take to finish?
Half-Life 2 takes around 15 hours to complete.Half-Life 2 Episode One Chapter 3 - Lowlife Walkthrough - No Commentary/No Talking
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