Capping frames to the monitor's refresh rate doesn't impact gameplay. I now use RivaTuner that comes tagged along with the freeware MSI afterburner to globally limit the framerate. In half life this can be done with fps_max in the console. The problem: issue of the slowing was a drop in frame rate due to overheating.ġ) Cap the frame rate to 60 Hz (equal to the refresh rate of my monitor).The dedicated graphics card showed 0 oC when not playing the game and I found out that the switchable graphics turns on the M7 dedicated GPU only when a full-screen application like a game is started. I used the freeware GPU temp to monitor my GPUs. Diagnosis: I found out that when temperatures exceeded 90 oC, the framerate drops.Apologies for the noobieness, but for me it was quite a steep learning curve : I thought to provide the solution to my question here.
resolution: 1920 x 1080* (native full screen).When starting game, 2% processor power and ~20% RAM used up.Advanced Systems care to shut down background processes.So I copied the settings from HL2 to Episode 1, in lieu of something more constructive.
Somehow the Radeon software suggested settings for HL2 that worked like a dream, but I can't get the Radeon software to work anymore. I copied the settings from half-life 2 to Episode 1. 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.Īny 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 did tinker around somewhat with the texture detail and water reflections because I'm aware they are over the recommended settings. But sometimes it keeps on running smoothly longer. It seems to happen often after 5 minutes of game play or so. It happens indoors, outdoors, enemies coming in or not, i.e., randomly in terms of game location. It doesn't happen gradually somehow, at a given moment, it just jitters and abruptly slows down to an unacceptable level. In earlier Half Life 2 games it would either run, or it wouldn't - making tinkering easier.Īs of now, it seems that something during game playing goes awry and slows the game suddenly down. The problem: after a few minutes of playing, without any issues, the game slows down and movements become jittery. I understand that Episode 1 is more demanding on the graphics. Half Life 2 ran perfectly after tinkering with the video settings. I'm playing Half-Life 2, Episode 1 on a mediocre laptop.