half-life 1 100% CPU usage?!?!

Hey ppl!

Im playing half-life 1 source and i noticed that the game was choppy no matter the settings. I checked out my task manager and it showed that half life was eating up 99% of my processor.

Now maybe im a little out of the loop, but isnt it a bit strange that a 10 year old game, ported or not, should use that much processing power? I've got a 1,6GHz processer, and in 1998 the best they had was 400MHz!!!

 

You are probably running the game in Software rendering mode. Go to Settings>Video and select D3D or OpenGL.

 

but software mode should run fine as well.

 

Definitely not. Software mode puts the whole rendering up to the CPU. Even a game from 1998 can't run fine in software mode these days

 

Heh, you can run Company of Heroes with software rendering. It takes a 3GHz Quad Core to run it at 10FPS with all minimum settings at lowest resolution, but it is still possible!

 

When I`ve played Quake2 on my ancient Duron 800Mhz, I sometimes used it in software rendering, and it didn not use 100% of the CPU. But, oh well.

 

It is normal a game eat all cpu availble, usually a game loop trough its game loop.
If my pentium 233 mmx ran the game using software renderer(at 400x300 but it was more than 20 times slower than each core of my core duo) you problably should run the game fine even at high resolutions. Although it runs prettier using the opengl renderer.

Those games were meant to run on software mode on 1998 computers. Although I agree that a modern game should run bad using a pure software renderer.
There is a software rasterizer that offers performance similar to a geforce fx 5700 in a penryn core 2 duo 8400
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/618

 

"Half-Life Source" not just "Half-Life" the source engine is a little bit more demanding than the original HL engine... Use d3d, even if the gma950 is weak it shouldn't have problem with the game.

 

Its running in hardware mode, so i really dont understand why it wont play properly. I've just pulled out the non-source version and that works like a charm, so ill just stick to that...

 

on older intel drivers source games ran very badly for me (10fps); newer drivers fixed that (i have x3100)

 

Um, why shouldn't it use 100% CPU? It's pretty normal for games to use all the CPU time they can get. Because, you know, the player usually wants the highest possible framerate.

I don't think that's related to the game being choppy. That's caused by something else.

 

if youre on vista, check that you aren't in low power mode - that limits your video card and cpu clocks

use cpu-z and rivatuner to monitor your clocks

 

He is playing on a gma 950.

 

I think it's that your video card is not up to the Source version's requirements at the resolution you're running. These Intel things are simply not good at all, and you're trying to run a 2004 game, not a game from 1998.

You say that the game is "ported" but really a better description is that it's been redesigned. It shouldn't run well on integrated graphics from 2005.

 

Let me put it this way, I can play HL2 in dx7 at 1400x1050 with smooth framerates (most of the time). Its not the fact that its a GMA950.

 

I'm not convinced. Anyway since you already have the original one, you should be happy as it's not like you are missing much anyway....

 

The reason that i eats up 100% is that many games, and more common for older games that the message loop is basically a while(1) { ....... }. unlike a normal message loop for a normal windows program where goes into a receive function and waits for the next message. When a process waits in receive it's actually not scheduled until it gets a new message.

Even if the rendering is finished it sits in this loop until it is supposed to render the next frame. Not very good from a power save perspective but this is how they did it. Hopefully they know better now.

 

That explains the mystery. I guess half-life was made before the time of laptop gaming, so power-wise programming wasnt as important then...