Again, using 3dAnalyze you can test this. It is capable of forcing a card to use only FP16 shaders no matter what is requested. You'll see virtually no image quality difference doing that - just a HUGE performance boost. Why? Well, because while FP16 is all that Half-Life 2 *needs* almost all the time, if they let the GeForce FX cards do THAT, they might have been competitive! So, instead, they forced full precision in every shader op (unneeded), which caused the GF-FX cards to render the DX9 mode in FP32 all the time. With the obvious associated performance hit.

Try it yourself. The link to the article is here. Download 3dAnalyze, and follow these instructions: Quote:

Originally Posted by Presi
Open it and follow the numbers:
1. select HL2.exe file in half-life 2 folder
2. select any file inside the folder half-life 2bin
3. select Steam.exe
than check these options:
- Under the section Pixel and Vertex Shader: FORCE LOW PRECISION PIXEL SHADER
- Under the section Remove stuttering: PERFORMANCE MODE
- on the bottom left: FORCE HOOK.DLL

If you haven't change the file dxsupport.cfg with the method described in the beginnig of this thread, you can obtain the same result typing in the section DIRECTX DEVICE ID'S the ATI Vendor and Device ID, there are just two device though.
....
In the end 3D ANALYZE gives me an error, CREATEPROCESS FAILED, I launch HL2 anyway, the water looked awesome, awesome detail and I noticed a boost in performance too. I think around 20/30% which allowed me to play the WATER HAZARD level with this setting: 1024x768 everything max, water relection to ALL, 2xAA, 4xAnisotropic with a range of fps of 40 and >150.