I have a great computer

But if I join a server with more than 6 or 7 people on it, I get poor performance. And even when I can play, it's not great. My computer has a good enough video card that most of the settings are default set to high (I changed them to low, but it had no effect) and Half-Life 2 (and 1 >_>) both work well, along with Garry's Mod.

My computer has a ton of memory, I just got it last week, it has a good processor, and it runs Vista. It does well at most others, but FF is just crap. I'd really like to play the game, so I'm asking for some help as to why this is happening and how I can fix/help my situation.

Thanks in advance.

Originally Posted by WtfItalian

But if I join a server with more than 6 or 7 people on it, I get poor performance. And even when I can play, it's not great. My computer has a good enough video card that most of the settings are default set to high (I changed them to low, but it had no effect) and Half-Life 2 (and 1 >_>) both work well, along with Garry's Mod.

My computer has a ton of memory, I just got it last week, it has a good processor, and it runs Vista. It does well at most others, but FF is just crap. I'd really like to play the game, so I'm asking for some help as to why this is happening and how I can fix/help my situation.

Thanks in advance.

vista is your problem

and what's your video card?

Evaluate on the Vista thing; my video card is an "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950". Like I said, good enough to run HL2 on high.

[BoltR]

Err, there are integrated graphics cards that are good enough to run HL2 on high?

Edit: It's possible that in HL2 it's offloading alot of the work onto your CPU. Compaired to FF, there is 'very little going on' which results in FF being pretty CPU heavy. Maybe it's having problems trying to keep up with doing both?

[phatfish]

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/

The specs look like it should be good enough for FF. It could be that Intel doesn't have great Vista drivers yet for their graphics chipset.

Do you have the latest drivers installed? That would be where i'd start.

[Ginger Lord]

What are the rest of your PC's specs.

[MikeQuist]

Again, running an integrated card will hold you back some, but not in the sense of a drastic change that your experiencing...Don't worry about that random Vista comment, it's a perfectly good operating system, and it's a baseless opinion which is not necessary in a serious help forum....

Are you aware of what kind of internet connection you have? Have you tried playing on lower ping/closer servers as opposed to further ones?

Make sure that your drivers are all updated. Also, let us know if you have this problem on other multiplayer source games, such as CSS and HL2DM.

[Ginger Lord]

Currently Vista loses about 10-25% of the performance in games compared to the same thing as XP.

The integrated graphics card will be a stalling point, HL2/CSS are nearly 3 years old now and are pretty basic, GarrysMod itself isn't hugely demanding these days. Fortress-Forever is pretty demanding, certainly on the network traffic side of things.

If reducing your settings doesn't help at all, then It looks like either Vista is the problem, your CPU or a driver issue.

I don't have a problem with any other source games (named, HL2M) and I have a wireless connection. It happens the worst on high ping servers, but on low pings it's a bit less intense.

[DrEvil]

You need to determine what kinda poor performance you are getting. Are you getting bad framerate or network lag? Wireless connections are well known for general shitty performance on games that are latency sensitive.

Do cl_showfps 1 in the console when you play and look if that number is getting down very low.

net_graph 1 gives you fps info as well as network information.

If the fps stays relatively high and you are just getting bad network performance try plugging into the actual network(not wireless). FF is more network intensive at the moment than other Source games, so don't assume that just because HL2DM works fine that the problem isn't the network latency. If the framerate gets low then it's stressing your hardware. Try +showbudget in the console to see specifically what is taking up the time(-showbudget to get rid of it).