half life

[lopenator]

I read somewhere that some one made a 128mb ram patch of half life 2 for it to run better. is this a real thing? 

[Bowlsnapper]

11 hours ago, lopenator said:

I read somewhere that some one made a 128mb ram patch of half life 2 for it to run better. is this a real thing? 

... Better? What does better mean? Lol

[lopenator]

6 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

... Better? What does better mean? Lol

frames not dropping to 3

[Bowlsnapper]

2 minutes ago, lopenator said:

frames not dropping to 3

Oh, damn. That's not good. Wonder what causes the framerate drops that gets resolved with more memory... I guess I would just associate that with clock speed, but I don't know what causes them in the first place.

[lopenator]

it's amazing that the game was successfully ported at all. I'm not too surprised that it runs choppy.

[corona2222]

1 hour ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Wonder what causes the framerate drops that gets resolved with more memory... 

Not HL2 but when I developed xbox games there was a push from high for games with explorable large worlds and seamless ( no loading screens ), we streamed (loaded) assets (mostly textures & models) into ram in the background while the game ran, it causes slow down of frame rate, mostly unnoticeable but sometimes  too much was changing - artists push (forgot) the limits ( set by wise programmers ).

There are different ways to allocate the 64mb ram that i can think of

Allocate on-the-fly. As long as your game never exceeds the ram available you're ok, oh and as long as the ram is not so fragmented you can't allocate memory. (XB Arcade games got away with it because they didn't change much once loaded)

To improve on that, developers of AAA games allocated known amounts of ram divided into GFX, Audio, data etc and wrote memory managers to reduce/eliminate fragmentation problems.

Most developers programmed code to identify when their game was executing in DebugKit 128mb or testing retail 64mb, so today you're stuck with the game running in 64mb even if the ram is upgraded to 128mb. The smart way for developers to use ram was ignore whether the game is running on debug or retail kit and just grab the total ram available, account for OS memory, and sub divide remaining ram, increase % GFX ram. (pretty obvious?)

So if the game was coded smart it will make use of the upgraded 128MB, thereby reducing swapping assets in the background (reduce interrupts on resources e.g. CPU and affecting GPU frame rate).

Another reason for low frame rates not improving with extra ram is just too much going on in the game scene with non-optimized shaders (GPU bottleneck) if the game was a quick port from the PC platform - which had better hardware and developers may not be skilled on limited hardware or given enough time if management and MS pushed the game out and overlooked frame rate issues. I had the experience of working with producers who never even looked at the game, just their schedule and tight budget, while the execs looked at the profit margin. Just looking up HL2 was released on PC 2004 and ported 2005 i'd expect it was some combination of the above as well as Valve focusing on newer consoles Xbox 360, released 2005. HL2 on OGX could have been a bit of a cash grab catching OGX at the tail end of life.

Edited August 10, 2023 by corona2222