Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Forum

Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Portal all run beautifully on the iMac (with a few tweeks...)

Half-Life: Episode 2 is a completely different story...

The first problem is really with the graphics - upon launching, the computer has a problem changing resolutions. Sometimes this can be very bad and crashes the game, other times it can be solved (to a point). The game has lots of crashing issues, including a massive slowdown in the second chapter that does cause the game to crash.

Does anyone have some good voodoo magic to run the game well?

Thanks.

I can reproduce this. It seems to be due to compressed textures, although I don't understand the details.

If you launch with -console, you can avoid the issue at startup. Then, you can try changing the advanced video settings to see if you can avoid the problem.

I have the same system configuration, I was able to get HL2 EP2 to FINALLY run just fine, no problems, by adding -console to the launch options, starting the game in 4:3 1024x768 (the mode it starts up in) and then tweaking my setting once the game started. Finally was able to finish the game, since it didn't work well with cx 6.2.1

Using -dxlevel 80 works around in the bug on the Leopard Radeon drivers. We also included a workaround in the unsupported snapshot build to make it work with the default dxlevel 81.

Thanks for the help. -dxlevel 80 cleared up everything and Episode 2 ran without any issues.