Condition Zero slow as hell, no other games suffer like this
4 replies, posted
So I bought the CS1 pack from steam and installed Counter Strike: Condition Zero. I think it might be a fun game if it would actually operate at a functional fps. The biggest issue I have is that games like CS:S, Universe Sandbox, Mass Effect, Deus Ex, San Andreas, and Team Fortress 2 all work at at least double the fps as CZ is. I don't understand why. Is there a logical explaination for this?
Speccy:
[img]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1470986/Photos/speccy.png[/img]
ATI has always had [I]terrible[/I] OpenGL support, which CS:CZ relies on (GoldSrc engine.) The problem is exacerbated by the fact that CZ uses massive amounts of detail textures (Detail textures are Targa images overlayed on the normal world textures to give the illusion of more detail.) The problem with this is that it causes the renderer to have to do two passes of rendering for one frame, which can make rendering 50% slower in some situations.
You have a few solutions here:
1) Run CZ in Direct3D mode. The downside to D3D mode is that it's extremely buggy (it was originally a hack to allow more people with cards that didn't support OpenGL at the time to play the game not using software mode), and you lose several OpenGL-specific effects like fog and detail textures. Other odd glitches are known to happen like Z fighting also.
2) Run CZ in software mode. The downside to this is that software mode is VERY slow (even on modern machines), and you lose all of the advanced hardware accelerated effects.
3) My personally recommended solution is to buy an Nvidia card, though it seems you're on a laptop, which makes this impossible. You're pretty much stuck with the above options, or get a desktop with an Nvidia GPU.
[QUOTE=bohb;31022764]ATI has always had [I]terrible[/I] OpenGL support, which CS:CZ relies on (GoldSrc engine.) The problem is exacerbated by the fact that CZ uses massive amounts of detail textures (Detail textures are Targa images overlayed on the normal world textures to give the illusion of more detail.) The problem with this is that it causes the renderer to have to do two passes of rendering for one frame, which can make rendering 50% slower in some situations.
You have a few solutions here:
1) Run CZ in Direct3D mode. The downside to D3D mode is that it's extremely buggy (it was originally a hack to allow more people with cards that didn't support OpenGL at the time to play the game not using software mode), and you lose several OpenGL-specific effects like fog and detail textures. Other odd glitches are known to happen like Z fighting also.
2) Run CZ in software mode. The downside to this is that software mode is VERY slow (even on modern machines), and you lose all of the advanced hardware accelerated effects.
3) My personally recommended solution is to buy an Nvidia card, though it seems you're on a laptop, which makes this impossible. You're pretty much stuck with the above options, or get a desktop with an Nvidia GPU.[/QUOTE]
I've actually been planning to build a desktop, and I'm p partial to Nvidia. Eventually, it'll happen. Thank you for explaining the issue, I had no idea so many detail textures were used, that sounds like a poor choice on the mappers part. I'm stuck on this machine for a bit, so I'll stick with option 1 for now.
Detail textures are assigned on a per-map basis by a config file, and stored in the maps folder. So if the map was de_dust.bsp, the config file would be de_dust_detail.txt
I forgot there was a CVAR to disable detail textures, but I don't know if it's been locked (Natural-Selection forces it off due to abuse.) The CVAR is "r_detailtextures 0/1" with 0 being off, and 1 being on. You can try turning them off to see if it helps with framerates.
Actually I found out the problem. I coulda swore I was in OpenGL, but I was in software. I just switched to OpenGL and it's fine now.
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