Is there a possibility to force 16bit rendering?

In what ?

In d3d Games. (especially HL2)

..set your desktop to 16-bit and run in window..

@roflkopp,

If a d3d game does not expose this option (16/32 bit color) in its game settings, you can try setting your desktop color to 16 bit and starting the game in a windowed mode instead of fullscreen, the game should then start and use 16 bit color.

I have tried this in Half life 2 and it did not make any difference in the fps, in fact I have tried almost every published tweak on the net for the game and nothing seems to improve its performance at all

My experience with this game on my 5500 system has been that some parts of the game have great fps (30-50) while other parts are terrible (8-12).

Unless someone figures out how to greatly improve this games performance on voodoo cards, I would not recommend purchasing the game with the intention of being able to play it at enjoyable fps on voodoo cards !

What system did you try it on?

@Garth,

Athlon 2400 XP
512 mb ram
Windows 2000 SP4
Amigamerlin 3.1 R1
Voodoo 5500 AGP

I was quite excited when I first installed the game and started to play it as the fps were quite good, but when I got to the canal level the framerate's really took a serious dive into the single digits sometimes (does not make for enjoyable game play).

ACK. Beside of this, plaing hl² in a windows reduces fps about 60%. No matter if 16bit or 32bit..

P.S.: My Sys;)

XP2400+@2400MHz
Radeon 9700pro@400/350MHz
Voodoo5 5500 PCI@180MHz
Abit NF7-S@200MHz
1GB TwinMos@2-2-3-11


@least a few Screeshots V5 @ Hl², 1024x768 4xAA:

http://img47.exs.cx/img47/6306/Aufnahme1.jpg
http://img47.exs.cx/img47/8963/Aufnahme3.jpg
http://img47.exs.cx/img47/5408/Aufnahme2.jpg

The only things that are are likely to improve performance are running in fastest mode no AA and measures that would reduce the size of the textures being downloaded. Running in 16bit mode would have the texture size compared to 32bit mode. Setting a maximum texture size or reducing the number of mipmaps might help aswell. You tend to end up being limited by the memory on the card.

SFFT