Not surprisingly: Intel GMA 945 Problems

Hello there, and first of all thank you for making Black Mesa, it is very well made, and you have a great team of developers.

Now on to the bug report.

I am running Black Mesa on a 2.0 Ghz Duo Core Processor, and Intel GMA 945 Mobile Chip, and Windows XP SP 3. I have all the latest updates installed.

First of all, when I first installed BMS, I couldn’t run it at all, it would crash with a memory error. However, I have plenty of experience troubleshooting games, and after a little research added the launch options:

“-window +mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1 –noborder”

I also am using a config (autoexec.cfg) which I edited for best performance, and quality.

The launch options allowed me to get to the menu, however the same memory error causes the game to crash at the resonance cascade. If I start a new game at any point afterwards, the same error occurs.

Basically, I can’t play at all after the resonance cascade.

There are also a lot of graphical bugs. I used impulse 101 to get all of the weapons, and literally all of them had the purple and black checkerboard texture. Soon after shooting off a few rounds, I get a blue screen…

I’ll take some screenshots and post them here too. As well as some info from the console. Yes, I know my laptop is horrible, but I’ve gotten some great gaming experiences out of it, and I’m not going to be upgrading too soon.

Any help is appreciated.

I have the same problem

Purple-black checkerboard is due to the game using dxlevel 80/81 renderpath with GMA 945. Read sticky FAQ thread (IIRC Question 6 or 9) to get info on how to switch the game into using dxlevel90/95 renderpath.

Blue screen - most likely misbehaving full screen post-processing shader.

Could you please show your autoexec.cfg file, I’m curious what commands do you use in order to get “best performance, and quality”. Next, dose the game start without having “+mat_forcehardwaresync 0 +snd_async_prefetch_priority 1” in the command line?

TBH I don’t expect that it’s possible to get BM working any close to the “playable” mark with GMA 945 - much more capable and powerful Intel HD 3000 can’t handle BM with a sufficient FPS to be comfortably playable - but I’m pretty curious about what are the main problems with the game running on THAT bad hardware environment as it could provide insights on how to improve experience for people playing on hardware like Radeon 9xxx.

I actually fixed the problem by adding “-dxlevel 90” to launch options, which fixed all of my problems, however it causes lighting problems (things are very dark, when they shouldn’t be) and extreme lag.

Now here is my autoexec, some of it I added myself.

Thanks for the replies!

Oh and just as a note, the fps is ridiculous in the test chamber, no matter what the settings.
It is always 2 fps, before during and after the cascade.
And at several places it is simply too laggy for playing, so I gave up.

Thanks for posting this. Well, just as I expected :-(.
As for test chamber - you could try FPS dropdown reduce fix I had posted here:
https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=14361

As for your config - there are a lot incorrect descriptions/usage patterns and useless or duplicate settings there. I could elaborate more on this topic if you’re interested but I’m afraid there’s no possible way IMO that would allow GMA 9xx to play this game at acceptable level.

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