I asked Raminator about Direct X 8 support for BMS (Because I think we’ve all experienced lag on BMS) , and this is his response:
"If DirectX8 was better than DirectX9, would would they have made DirectX9?
The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Steam users are running DirectX9 (or 10 or 11) capable hardware. It doesn’t make sense for us to spend a huge amount of time reworking core technology in the game to support the tiny fraction of people who are running outdated hardware that won’t be around for much longer anyway."
So I guess it’s up to the community to make a mod for BMS (Modception I know) to fix DirectX 8 issues on BMS. Because the actual mod team think it’s a waste of time.
I have a Radeon 5450 and a 2.8ghz P4 (yeah, super low end) and tried forcing dx80 and dx81, but caused a big white line to go through the screen. The FPS were much better though. Is the line the only issue, or would things be missing if I used that?
Right now I settled on forcing the base dx90 and and running on all low with medium textures and models. Smoke is my biggest FPS killer and I an drop to single digits which is no good.
I would appreciate anyone getting at least the line fixed.
The version of source BM runs on doesn’t even support DX6 anymore.
DX8 atleast works to some degree. Various things need adjusting and some, removing for it to work properly. I played through the entire game on DX8 with only one point where I needed DX9 due to a map not loading. It’s seriously not worth the effort to backport assets and code to DX8.
I can’t help you with the unfortunate white line, but I can help you with the smoke being an FPS-Killer, however.
Simply add “-r_drawparticles 0” (without “”) to Black Mesa’s launch options and start the game.
Instructions on how to add commands to your launch options can be found in one of my previously submitted posts: “To enable the console:”.
(Just ignore “7. Type “-dev -console” (without “”).” and type “-r_drawparticles 0” (without “”) instead.)
Voila, no smoke or particles in general!
I don’t know how much of an impact on performance this will have, so please report back if it worked.
You can also enable and disable the particles “on the fly”, if the console has been previously enabled, by typing one of the following commands into the console and hitting ENTER:
r_drawparticles 0 - OFF r_drawparticles 1 - ON
Turning off almost all the particles takes away a lot of realism, as you only see a short, bright flash when a grenade explodes (a real explosion is missing), for example, but if it helps your performance, you should try it out.
Thanks for the advice, but I don’t want to turn the smoke off entirely. I would rather have a lower quality smoke, if possible.
I have some tweaks in use already (force preload and heapsize). They seem to keep my stuttering to a minimum. I am also on a fresh install of Windows 7 (32-bit) with the latest 12.8 Catalyst drivers and a full 4gb of RAM.
I hope the first patch brings some performance improvements.
Performance. Even if a low end card supports it, it doesn’t mean it has the horsepower to really use it. People with low end rigs like mine can use it to get some extra FPS. The visual difference between DX8 and DX9 is actually pretty small, but the performance isn’t.
I’ll try to force that white line by using the same settings and .cfg file, just need to re-install BMS again.
Somehow must have messed up the installation when zipping my savefiles for a backup… Now it just crashes on load (hl2.exe has stopped working), even with the SAVE folder empty / not existing.
That white line / border looks rather familiar, as well (click the submitted link in the first post for a reference pic):
Thanks for the PM Jenova19. Unchecking the HUD post processing did indeed fix the white line. I used these settings for a little while in TF2 and did not experience this issue. I assume it does not use the HUD post processing.
I think I will run with these settings for a while and report any issues I have.
Well we do have the current DX level. It’s just most peoples computers can’t really handle it, so we have it set lower to help with performance. I do the same thing with Team Fortress 2 and the like, and it helps a great deal.
Would love to have DX8 support in the near future, not just for me but for other people like me.
Seriously? Is Raminator on the BM team? I’m sorry but that sounds like someone who doesn’t know anything about game engines would say! I would advise talking to him again, he seems to misunderstand a very basic issue here.
Graphics cards advertised as DX8-compatible do not support DX9. So if you try to play a game that was built to target DX9, it won’t work on the DX8 graphics card. Direct3D won’t initialize and the game will either handle the error by shutting down gracefully or crashing.
Source engine 2007 targets both DX8 and DX9 so 1) it can support DX8 graphics cards and 2) for DX9 graphics cards it can enable DX9-only effects.
Source engine 2009 only targets DX9. Valve has said they won’t move TF2 over (and I assume the same reasoning goes for the other games on 2007’s engine) because that would mean dropping support for DX8, and apparently there are still a significant number of TF2 players that cannot run Source Engine 2009 due to the DX9 only restriction.
AFAIK BM includes no notices for DX8 card owners that DX8 is not supported. Thus it is reasonable to assume that DX8 mode IS supported and that graphical bugs in DX8 mode due to missing DX8-specific assets are legitimate bugs.
If DX8 is not supposed to be supported the BM team should put a notice somewhere to that effect.
Side note: You can install DX9 when you have a DX8-only card because DX9 also includes builds of every version of DX from 1 to 8 (well not exactly, but close enough). Whichever version of DX a game was built for will be used.
Also… “why would they have made DirectX9”? Really? So I suppose Microsoft should just stop making new versions of Windows until they make one that is “the best” then never make another one ever again? It doesn’t work like that. Software will get incremental improvements and new version numbers to reflect this. The newer versions are designed to be “better” in some way.
Some products will even plan for extensive new features, code rewrites, or other improvements months in advance, but will still work on smaller improvements and releases before tackling those big ones.
It is worth noting that using DX8 in TF2 means you do not get the colored outline around the intelligence and bomb carriers that can be seen through walls. This puts you at big disadvantage.
I put all my settings to low in order to keep DX9 on for that very reason. But for BMS I would rather have higher textures and models for a more cinematic experience.
Well that was a bust. Looks like there are some missing effects when running in DX81. I attached a screenshot. My guess is there is some kind of overlay that wont render in DX81 so you get the purple and black checkerboard.
I’d ask if there was a way to disable the checkerboard so it was simply not there (leaving the texture underneath visible), but even Gordan’s hands are all metallic looking. There is most likely more missing.
If a dev can assure me that there will be an effort to fix DX81 related issues, I will put some time in to find whats missing. But I won’t waste time if what tommy255 said is true.
I am giving up on DX81 for now. I will revisit it when the first patch comes out.
This is sort of like using Internet Explorer 6 because it runs on a 486 (and therefore must be faster).
Assuming your hardware is less than ten years old, using an older graphics API does not do anything for performance. If anything, it makes it worse, because the whole point of a graphics API is to enable hardware acceleration so things perform better.
What does help performance is removing features that are unsupported (or slow) under that older graphics API. The only reason any Source engine game runs better under DX8 is because various features are stripped out so “low quality” becomes even lower quality. Assuming your hardware is somewhat recent, DirectX 9 is not slowing this thing down: it’s a mix of bad drivers and incompatible graphics features. Usually, it’s because the game assumes it has hardware support where none is offered, resulting in some really slow software emulation. If you are keen on a mod to improve performance, I suggest you start from a different angle. Play with Source’s profiling features, see if you can find what resources are being slow, and try to build some simple replacements. (You will need to make those replacements; they don’t happen on their own). I’d put money on particle effects being a big part of the problem, and they’re something you can tweak fairly easily.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
