HDR Performance Issue Created 16 years ago2007-05-28 00:07:20 UTC by RotatorSplint

I recently got a new monitor (22" LDC), and fired up Episode One for the first time with it. To my great dismay, video playback while I was moving was horribly choppy. The choppiness was steady (not pausing but constant), and became highly apparent when my flashlight was on. I figured it had to do with lighting, and after messing in the video options for a little bit, I found that the source of the problem was HDR. The problem disappeared after I turned it off. What's odd is that the framerate dropped from a perfectly steady 60 FPS to a perfectly steady 30 FPS.

So my question is, what is bearing the weight of HDR? My graphics card or my RAM? I only have 1 GB of RAM, and an nVidia 7800 GT (256 MB). I wouldn't be surprised if it was either, but what concerns me is that I get perfect, unfaltering performance in Doom 3, and yet my computer can't seem to handle this.

Any ideas?

I use HDR on my Lost Coast and Episode One games. They work fine, I have the same amount of RAM and an ATI x700 (256MB). Have you tried HDR on another game that supports it?

Haha, "only"? I can understand what you mean when you're talking about how much memory you have, but that's a high end video card you've got there. I really don't think that's going to be slowing you down.

@srry: Well yeah, that's what I was thinking (And I mean the 'only' for the RAM. I'm really satisfied with the card).

@saw: It's problematic in all Source games, and really shows in areas with lots of bloom. Even having HDR off but bloom on results in the same choppiness. It is also problematic in all display resolutions (Yes, even 640 x 480, though less so).

My +showbudget is screwed on this computer, so I can't tell where the resources are being drawn from. All I know is that it has to do with HDR.

That's very odd, I have a 7900GT and 2gb of RAM and it goes fine, also for a short while I only had 1gb and it made no difference (other than the load times). What's your Processor speed? If it's on-par with the rest of your bits it shouldn't make a difference too. Very strange.

I have an AMD X2 5200; about 2.6 GHz at full blast.