The place is generally correct, but the height value reported by getpos seems to be a bit off. Here is more correct one to use:
setpos -701.474915 -1567.974365 -290; setang -0.292490 27.619244 0.000000Yes, there’s nothing wrong with that place at a first glance but if you would try to unlock FPS limiter (set fps_max to something like 300) and then try looking at different direction there you’d find that when looking towards the direction setang sets you FPS drops down 1.5x-3x times compared to what it is when looking at other directions. This is due to technically invisible water on the floor located right behind the wall you’re looking at. Try executing mat_fillrate 1 in console and you’d get an idea. Disabling reflection rendering for water workarounds this FPS drop. It seems not to be a big problem with a GPU like 550 Ti when running whithout AA @1400x900, but as soon as you increase output resolution or enable 4xAA FPS starts to approach ~30 range which is uncomfortably low IMO.
It is a fillrate shortage due to overdraw caused by smoke cloud particle system. If you try to use any higher resolution like 1680x1050 there - FPS would be in the “uncomfortable zone” even without zooming.
Like in (B) here there are obvious problems with dynamic lighting calculation. I have no ideas what’s wrong with it in BM and why there are no similar problems with setting zombies on fire in HL2 (Ravenholm) or in HL2:EP1.
And these are not the worstest cases - in case you happen to be shot by the sentry guns in bm_c1a3b near this spot:
] getpos
setpos -1377.831665 -726.231445 -17.525650;setang 12.491111 -90.911560 0.000000FPS could drop down to as low as ~20 making pretty hard to react properly on heavy fire and to run away or to snipe the turret.
Yeah, I also have this PoV on the problem: the game is Ok to play with GTX 550 Ti and any 3.0-3.5GHz dual-core CPU. But it does not run perfectly well though. And it also means that people with ~100 USD nowdays GPUs like GTX 540 or GTX 640 would suffer from these drops hardly. And you could guess yourself how would cards like Intel HD 2000/3000/4000 perform in problematic places :-D. Still IMO it’d be better (and more people would benefit from it) if devs would consider spending some time optimizing dlights and fillrate issues related to particle systems rather than spend way more time re-implementing shaders fallbacks for dxlevel 80/81 renderpaths (which - if it would be done - won’t necessary mean better performance when using legacy pipeline).
