2. Overclock the hell out of your video card (use rivatuner and hotkey it).
3. Nvidia no longer supports geforce 2's in their drivers. However, omega drivers don't have this constraint - download and install the most recent 'performance' nvidia omega driver.
4. Set performance settings to 'high performance' in the nvidia tweak menu. Then go into the nvidia control panel under control panel/display/settings tab/advanced button/Geforce tab. Go to Performance and Quality settings and change vertical sync to 'off'. Then go to the 'refresh rate overrides' and change the refresh rate for 800x600 to your monitor's optimal (maximum) refresh rate (85hz & upwards is best).
5. Set antialiasing to '2x' in the nvidia tweak menu - no antialiasing looks badddd...
6. Set anisotropy to 'off' in the nvidia tweak menu - doesn't make a huge difference IMHO anyway, and reduces performance quite significantly.
7. Install and update halflife 2.
8. Play in offline mode.
9. Set resolution to 800x600. Set antialiasing to 2x. Set shadow detail to low and shader detail to high. Set filtering to trilinear and vertical sync to off. Set textures to 'medium' or 'low' and models to 'medium'. Setting textures to medium can occasionally slow down the fps, particularly with heavy volumetric lighting scenes, but it looks way better.
10. Add the following commands to the halflife 2 shortcut: "-heapsize 512000 +map_background none +exec c:\games\steam\mytweaks.cfg". Note: the 512000 is for users with 1GB of system ram or more - if you have less, set it to half your system ram size, expressed in kilobytes (in this case, 512000 kilobytes).
11. Make a text file called "mytweaks.cfg" under the steam directory- then edit it and insert the following into it:
snd_mixahead 0.7
cl_forcepreload 1
sv_forcepreload 1
cl_smooth 0
cl_ragdoll_collide 1
r_fastzreject 1
muzzleflash_light 0
r_decals 1000
r_maxmodeldecal 25
dsp_enhance_stereo 1
mat_bloom 0
r_lod -2
mat_clipz 1
It actually looks pretty good. Better than my friend's geforce 3, anyway - they're both on the same internal hl2 engine path though, so that's not saying much...
Here's the obligatory screenshot:
More screenshots:
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Enjoy!
m@
p.s This game plays a lot better (gameplay-wise) on 'hard'. Also, sometimes with these older cards you have to change a setting (any setting) in the graphics menu within halflife in order for the flashlight to show up - I don't know why this is - it just is. What I do is to set the antialiasing settings in the nvidia menu to '2x', then halflife 2 tends to ignore whatever antialiasing settings it has (they're overriden by nvidia's setting). So just set the nvidia setting to 2x, then everytime you start up halflife (before you start the game, set the antialiasing within the game to whatever value, so long as it's different from the current value. Then your flashlight will show up- try not to change settings once you've started a game as it can take a long, long time for hl2 to reconfigure itself...
