Overclocking to Solve FPS Drops?

[fretfulolive]

Hey y'all - starting here, but feel free to redirect me elsewhere if there is a better community to ask this in. It's a pretty deep in the weeds problem. 

My pet project right now (after 15+ years out of the modding scene) is playing modded H2 games at LAN parties. The issue I’m having is when doing the stupid/wacky mods (i.e., everything explodes, 100 rockets flying across a map, etc) the framerate understandably drops dramatically (down to 15 or less sometimes).

Is there a solution for this? I’ve got the [Halo 2 HD patch](https://github.com/grimdoomer/Halo-2-HD?tab=readme-ov-file) applied and so far I’ve only gone with the suggested GPU overclock of 266mhz, which doesn’t seem to have helped.

I’ve already gone ahead and upgraded my cooling (Fans on both heatsinks, thermal paste redone) – should I just push the GPU overclock as far as I can, or is there a bottleneck elsewhere when rendering large amounts of projectile physics?

What are my options for CPU overclocking these days? CPU swap is out, but if I wanted to push the stock silicon as far as I can - are there tools for this? I've followed [this tutorial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyADrmESlno&t=4s), but when I patch my Cerbios, XBMC still registers my CPU as the stock 733 clock. That video is older than Cerbios, so is it possible that patch doesn't work for Cerbios and I need to use an older BIOS?

Any input is appreciated!

[Jay]

As was discussed in the GitHub for Halo 2 patch from Grimdoomer, the bottleneck for Halo 2 is actually the RAM.

Upgrading your RAM from the stock 64MB to 128MB would significantly improve performance, as the patch has custom optimized memory handling when 128MB is present.

Overclocking GPU and CPU only helps slightly.