alright guys im a new user on this forum and stuff but I need help i can not figure this out and im not a noob with computers. Alright my rig i play half life 2 1280/1024 resolution everything up maxed no problems 60+ fps npw when i Play EP1 i set it to lesser setting to take HDR into considerration but now no matter what i have it set at it doesnt get above 30 fps even at 640/480 is the game running poorly on other systems i just dont understand because i have a decent system not great but decent
Ill give you the specs

Athlon xp 3400 Abit Kv7 Mobo Pny 6800GS 1 gig of ram Pc400 (3200) a 80 gig hardrive dvd drive and a 500 watt power supply cant remember what its called but its nice has 3 fans and varible speed contreol but yeah thats the deal

have you got the latest drivers for you gfx card. if yes i think your card just can't handle the HDR. switch it off and if the ganme plays fine thats your answer. i manage everything maxed at 1920 x 1200 so the game is fine.

I have the 84.21 for my card i think they are the newest but the funny thing is I upgraded from my 9600xt and that card wast that great but im not getting the kind of performance i thought i would get fro 180$ pisses me off wasnt the 6800 series just last year or 21 years ago they should be plenty fsat still right? I used the omega drivers and it was wonderful but this is well dumb just makes me mad....oh well

this shouldnt happen.
hl2 ep1 doesnt have much higher requirements than hl2
i run hl2 ep1 highest everything except AA and AF, HDR on full 1024x768 and it works perfect.

I think this issue is not so simple as a lot of people running HL2:EP1 might believe it to be.

My PC is ok, it's certainly good enough to run Half Life 2 and, with HDR turned off, Lost Coast will run without any problems. My specs are as follows:

A64 3200+ Winchester
1Gb Crucial DDR400 CAS3
ATi x700 Pro 256Mb PCIe

Admittedly the x700 Pro card is the weak link in the system but it runs the game fluidly at 1280*1024 with the settings up full, except for HDR, which I turn off. The problem is this:

In the section after Gordon and Alyx are thrown into the citadel by Dog, you pass through an archway into the next section of the game. Alyx says something about not being able to believe how bad the damage to the structure of the citadel was, but after about a second or two of this the game crashes. I turned the display settings down and the game no longer crashed. My conclusions are:

1.It is highly probable that Episode 1 may possibly use larger textures than Half Life 2.
2.Episode 1 is not as stable as Half Life 2.
3.It's not necessarily the processor on my graphics card that couldn't cope with the game, it's not the amount of onboard GDDR, it's got to be something to do with the overall bandwidth of the buses in your PC.

I believe that the model of Alyx Vance is a higher quality one in Episode 1 than it was in Half Life and I know that there are extra-high quality settings available to people running the game on PCs with graphics cards, RAM and CPUs much faster than mine, but surely the point of the survey they let us take on Steam would be to make this game stable on lower-end systems too?

Don't forget that it's very possible to run HL2 on a Radeon 9800, a Pentium 4 that doesn't necessarily run on socket 775 and with 512Mb of RAM. I don't see why Episode 1 should crash at this point in the game, especially when there's nothing going on on-screen at the time.

I refuse to end this post with recommendations for any of you to upgrade from a HL2-worthy system just to play Episode 1. I'm afraid it's part of the software design process not just to analyse the software's aim, not just to code it and make documentation, but to fully test it as well, and I think that we, as games players, forget that we should demand this just as much of our games as we would of any other product we purchase.

have you tried re installing it or verifying the game data.

Nah, I didn't particularly think of that as an option because surely, as I had downloaded it all from Steam, it would be exactly the same when I re-downloaded it, so I had to play the whole thing in 640*480, which wasn't great.

I was thinking about upgrading my PC, I was thinking I might go for a new everything except for mobo, mouse, keyboard, monitor, HDDs and optical drives, then I figured that it's really not worth it, I feel that PC games releases are far too infrequent right now, I might as well wait 5 years, buy a really good gaming PC and catch up on 5 years of great games, as well as being able to play the ones that my x700 Pro is crap at, due to the fact that it came out of some ATi technician's bunghole.

It almost sounds like a vsync issue although it doesn't seem reasonable that your monitor would be set for 30hz. Try disabling vsync in the vid driver.