Hi guys, I usually don’t play any of my games in dx 8 but with Black Mesa I feel like I have no choice. I seem to be getting framerate drops from stuff like particle effects so I just tried running Black Mesa in direct x 8 boost my performance. Unfortunantly, as of now there is no support for direct x 8 so I was just wondering if it will be added in the future. I understand that the mod is ‘young’ and there may need to be some further optimizing but none the less, I’d still like to know.
Why should they be?
Because it provides MUCH, MUCH better framerate than 9,and i think this mod should be available to everyone! Not just people with good computers.
DX9C (never mind older Dx9 versions) cards came out in 2004 so who is using a PC older that to play a modernised game like this?
There is a reason the game had to look like it did back then compared to the revamp.
Things have got to move forward not backwards, look at crappy consoles keeping many games DX9C an giving us bad console ports.
Why not just make this game DOS with your outlook so any old PC can play it.
Do you know DX11 is actually faster than DX10!
I have a pc from 2009 with a integrated nivida card and can play l4d2 at lowest settings pretty fast, but not BMS. Same problems as you. Hope they add DX8 support in the near future, or optimize the game, like l4d2.
Get a better graphics card…
Your position is understandable and respected but still majority of PCs sold all over the world are equipped with the GPUs from the “most major GPU vendor” which happen to be… Intel. And despite their chips getting better and better in later generations (HD 3000 and up) they are still aren’t that fast when performing D3D9 SM2/3 tasks (it’s good that they are at least able to do DX9 stuff - earlier generations like GMAxx hadn’t been able to properly do most of D3D9). So it’s viable to at least try to optimize BMS to a level so people would get a more consistent FPS - for now FPS drops at some places is a problem that affects not only Intel GPU users but also users having not to bad cards like GFX460/560. I.e. if BMS would run with a consistently stable FPS on a middle-range GPUs - it would automagically mean that it would be playable with Intel HD 3000 GPUs at a moderate-to-low consistenf FPS levels (~30FPS, and not ~30FPS dropping down to an unplayable 3-5 at some areas like it is now).
P.S. But, yeah, the easiest way to solve the problem for OP is to get a better videocard: something like GTX660 would be an ideal choice.
No.
You can set a Launch Option “-dxlevel 80” or 81 to force hardware directX 8. Right-click, Properties, Set Launch Options… on the Steam icon.
It would broke the game: BMS currently do not implement fallbacks that are required to play the game without visual glitches and crashes on pre-90 dxlevels.
Go find a max FPS config for some other source-based game and tweak it to run on BMS?
I’m playing with -dxlevel 80 and i only saw a few glitches, like the purple and black eyes and Magnum, but nothing really important. Is that a thing so hard to fix? I don’t know, so i ask. 
The answer is “it depends”. Basing on my experience working with Source SDK and editing/compiling levels - it’s not THAT hard but it require some work to be done for every level. Would BMS devs opt in to do it - is an open question. IMO it’d be more important for the current moment to fix major outstanding bugs that had been reported so far, then proceed with optimizing FPS drops and only then consider the possibility to implement support for dxlevels 80/81. And don’t forget that they have a lot of other work to be done: Xen, deathmatch, real life™ :-). It’s just a humble guess though.
After reading the generic ‘get a better graphics card’ reply i’ve decided to add the fact that my computer is not as bad as what I may have made it out to be. It can play Cs:Go on very high settings so the fact that Blackk Mesa lagged at certain points really surprised me. If anything its the new particle system, whenever the particles are on the screen, the framerate chuggs. The Direct X 8 would most likely eliminate these issues.
Expecting people to cater to a way out of date directx is too much. The point of this was to make HL1 look like it was made recently. You aren’t going to do that with Directx8 and old integrated graphics cards. You don’t want to buy a new graphics card, and that’s fine, but you live with the consequences. And believe me, they are your consequences not anyone elses.
Posting this again. You can play through almost the entire game in DX8 so long as you don’t mind graphical errors. There’s a few sections where I had to noclip to proceed due to the underwater effect displaying incorrectly, mainly residue processing. Also one map where DX9 is absolutely required or it won’t load. It really isn’t that big of a deal to backport everything to DX8 when it already works well enough. There’s just no need for it.