Half Life 2 frame rate issue

[HunterK]

Hey all, I'm trying to run Half Life 2 and all expansions. (I've honestly never beat Ep1+Ep2!) I installed via Orange Box DVDs. It opens and also runs just fine. I've also installed the March2008 Direct X 9 which helps with things. (I do also use a script that runs steam in its own X server.)

I just want to know if there is anything else I can do to improve my frame rate? A tweak here, a tweak there....

It seems like wide open areas kill my FPS. I know for a fact that my PC can run this game flawlessly.

Quick Specs:
Athlon64 3500+
2GB ram
nVidia 6800GT
Gutsy 7.10 with latest nVidia drivers installed by Envy.

[HunterK]

Ok, I tried a bunch of things and seemed to get things working ok. It all left me a little confused though.

I ended up using the following command to launch Half Life 2:

WINEDEBUG=-all wine steam.exe -applaunch 380 -novid -dxlevel 80 -refresh 75 -width 1280 -height 1024 -heapsize 512000

This worked, but it seemed like my FPS was capped at 30. "cl_showfps 1" showed 31 all of the time. I thought that was weird, so as a last ditch effort, I changed all of the video settings to their lowest value.

FPS shot up to 75 and stayed there! (Vsync was working and everything was butter!)

I then began to increase each video setting until I found out what was causing the slowdown. I ended up with all of the same max settings as before but the FPS was still at 75. I don't get it!! :confused:

I will continue to mess with this when I get home from work.

[Termy58]

Your settings are already kinda low, I would try dx level 7. But you won't be able to even attempt EP2