turning your settings down

wow this can help A LOT! I recently turned my model detail down to medium, turned shadows down to low, shaders to low, and anti-aliasing down to 2x, and the game does not look that much worse but the game feels so much faster and smoother, its like my character has lost 100 pounds or something. this is one part of the HL2DMU curriculum that I have always overlooked until now and I wish I hadn't before. if your game feels slow or you feel like you're playing through molasses, turn your settings down. it will help.

I used to do that but it made the game look too ugly.

here are some commands i used

mat_mipmaptextures 1 // _texture quality decreases with distance_
mat_picmip 2 // _lower texture quality--set between 0 and 4_
r_decal_cullsize 2 // _lower texture quality at distance_
r_eyes 0 // _removes eyes from player models_
r_occlusion 0 // _disables occlusion--lowers image quality but gains FPS_
r_propsmaxdist 100 // _lower object fading distance_
r_rootlod 2 // _lower overall game detail level_
r_teeth 0 // _removes teeth from player models_

Thanks for the advice fellas. I will try this stuff out. What I really need is a better computer, but I can't afford anything right now. So.... I'll just make due with what I've got.

yeah having high fps helps.
That's why I did my fps config for ^^

Congratulations, you are now experimenting framerates.

Something else to think about is your native resolution with your monitor. All LCD monitors have a maximum resolution with a digital input, which is it's "native resolution", mine is 1680x1050 for example. Basically, this means that the graphics card is filling each screen pixel with a pixel element. If you have your game resolution turned down below it's maxium and/or are using the vga input instead of digital your sharpness will suffer dramatically. Also, very important, your graphics card and/or monitor are forced to scale the image up, like stretching desktop wallpaper. This is done by creating pixel elements to fill voids. You can see how much is actually generated by turning off your monitor scaling (it will appear as black bars all around the natural image scale). Point here is that you can set the graphics to it's highest res possible and not take as much fps off as you think and the sharpness of the image is well worth it even if you have to turn down filtering and textures.