The Slowest Level in the Game

For our fifth and final demo we turn to one of the last levels in the game – d3_c17_12.  This city level takes place mostly outdoors and gave us the lowest average frame rates out of any level we played in during our testing of Half Life 2.  A combination of all of the fire shaders as well as the explosions and weapon fire and the outdoor lighting make for one very stressful test. 

Our player fires upon one of the mammoth mechanical spiders using a handful of weapons, including the RPG which in itself ends up being decently stressful on the GPU. 

Although this demo yielded the lowest average frame rates out of our entire suite of demos, the level itself does not appear to be overly GPU bound.  Instead it would seem that even at 1280 x 1024, we’re mostly CPU bound here which is definitely not what we expected. 

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