Black Mesa is a first-person shooter video game that’s developed and published by Crowbar Collective. It is a third-party remake of Half-Life game. The Black Mesa game was initially released as a free mod in September 2012 for Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms. To recall, Half-Life is also a first-person shooter game developed by Valve Corporation and launched in 1998. Now, if you’re a Black Mesa player and facing lagging, freezing, crashing, fps drops, etc, then you can check how to fix Black Mesa lag.
It’s known to all that most of the video games have some issues or errors that can ruin the gameplay experience either while launching the game or during the gameplay and Black Mesa is no exception here. So, if you’re also one of them and experiencing plenty of issues, then this guide is for you. Here we’ve provided the steps to fix lagging, crashing, fps drop issues or some error codes as well.
Before going to the troubleshooting steps, you should check out some of the possible things that can also cause errors or crashes or lags on your computer. Such as make sure to install pending updates of the Windows OS and your graphics card driver. Once done, check whether the game patch update is available or not. If available, you should also install that patch update which can fix all of these issues. If nothing works, check the game system requirements and then follow all the methods below.
Why Does Black Mesa Keep Crashing?
There can be possible reasons behind Black Mesa that keeps crashing on your Windows 10 PC. Let’s take a look.
- Your PC configuration isn’t compatible with the game’s system requirements.
- Some of the game files are either missing or corrupted.
- Your PC is running on an outdated Windows OS or graphics driver.
- An outdated DirectX version.
- The game or the client version isn’t updated.
- Any of the overlay apps are running in the background.
- Windows Firewall or Antivirus program is blocking the game.
Minimum System Requirements:
- OS: Windows 7 (32/64-bit)/Vista or Greater
- Processor: 2.6 Dual Core Processor or Greater
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2 GB Dedicated Video Card or Greater
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 20 GB available space
Recommended System Requirements:
- OS: Windows 7 (32/64-bit) or Greater
- Processor: 3.2 Quad-Core Processor or Greater
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 4 GB Dedicated Video Card or Greater
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 20 GB available space
Black Mesa: Fix Lag Shuttering, Freezing, Crashing on Launch or FPS drop issue
Now, without wasting any more time, let’s jump into the steps below. Keep in mind that both the Nvidia and AMD graphics drivers are well optimized for the Black Mesa game. So, if in case, you haven’t updated your graphics driver yet, do this first.
1. Update Graphics Drivers
If you’re using the Nvidia graphics card then update the GeForce Experience app on your PC from the Nvidia official site here. But if you’re using the AMD graphics card on your system, then update the latest AMD Drivers from here.
2. Disable Steam Overlay
- Open Steam on your Windows.
- Head over to the Settings > Click on the In-Game option.
- Click on the checkbox to disable “Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game“.
- Once the checkbox mark is removed, click on OK.
3. Adjust Discord Settings
- Launch Discord > Click on User Settings.
- Select Voice & Video from the left sidebar.
- Scroll down a bit and click on the Advanced.
- Next, disable OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco System, Inc.
- Then disable Enable Quality of Service High Packet Priority.
- Click on Overlay.
- Disable in-game overlay.
- Next, click on Appearance.
- Scroll down to the bottom Advanced.
- Disable Hardware Acceleration.
- Once done, restart the Discord or restart the system.
- Finally, check whether the Black Mesa Lag fixed or not.
4. Adjust Nvidia Control Panel Settings
- Click on Adjust image settings with preview under 3D settings.
- Select Use the advanced 3D image settings.
- Next, open the Nvidia Control Panel.
- Click on Manage 3D settings.
- Then select Global Settings.
- Now, adjust some of the additional settings:
- Turn off Image Sharpening
- Turn on Threaded Optimization
- Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
- Low Latency Mode: Off
- Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
5. Adjust AMD Control Panel Settings
- Click on Global Graphics.
- Disable Radeon Anti-Lag
- Disable Radeon Boost
- Image Sharpening: Off
- Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
- Set Anti-aliasing Method to Multi-sampling
- Morphological Filtering: Off
- Anisotropic Filtering: Disabled
- Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
- Surface Format Optimization: Enabled
- Tesselation Mode: AMD Optimized
- Turn off Wait for V-sync
- OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
- Shader Cache: AMD optimized
- Turn off Maximum Tesselation Level
- GPU Workload: Graphics
- Radeon Chill: Off
- Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled
6. Repair Game from Steam Client
Make sure that this process will take some time. So, have some patience.
Turn off Image Sharpening
Turn on Threaded Optimization
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Low Latency Mode: Off
Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
Disable Radeon Anti-Lag
Disable Radeon Boost
Image Sharpening: Off
Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
Set Anti-aliasing Method to Multi-sampling
Morphological Filtering: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: Disabled
Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
Surface Format Optimization: Enabled
Tesselation Mode: AMD Optimized
Turn off Wait for V-sync
OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
Shader Cache: AMD optimized
Turn off Maximum Tesselation Level
GPU Workload: Graphics
Radeon Chill: Off
Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled
Launch Steam Client
Click on Black Mesa from the left sidebar
Now, click on Game Options
Choose Scan and Repair
7. Verify Game Files on Steam (Steam User Only)
The Black Mesa gamers on Steam can follow the below steps:
- Open the Steam Library by logging into the account.
- Right-click on Black Mesa
- Click on Properties
- Select the Local Files tab
- Then click on Verify Integrity of Game Files
- Wait for the process and then restart the game to check whether the issue has been fixed or not.
8. Uninstall Windows 10 Updates (Unstable/Buggy Versions)
A couple of days ago, Microsoft has released a new update for Windows 10 with KB4535996. The KB4535996 cumulative update for Windows 10 is quite buggy and causing so many errors or problems.
- Go to Start menu > Click on Settings
- Next, click on Update and Security
- Click on View update history
- Now, if you can see that there is an update having KB4535996 has been already installed. Make sure to uninstall it.
- Here you will see Uninstall updates option on the top of the page.
- Click on it and select that particular update version.
- Right-click on it and select Uninstall.
- It may take some time to delete that update and your system may restart automatically.
- Have some patience and you can also manually reboot your Windows PC (if required).
9. Clean Temporary Files to fix Black Mesa Lag
- Press Windows key + R on your keyboard to open the RUN program.
- Now, type %temp% and press enter
- You will get a bunch of temporary files on a page.
- Select all files by pressing Ctrl + A on the keyboard.
- Next, press Shift + Delete on the keyboard to remove all the files.
- Some times some of the temporary files can’t be deleted. So, leave them as it is and close it.
10. Use CPU and GPU Clock Speed at Default Settings
If you’ve overclocked your GPU speed and experiencing the crashing or stuttering issue on the Black Mesa gameplay or at the launching, make sure to use the MSI Afterburner tool or Zotac firestorm to underclock or set default clock speed. Now, you can try again to run the game whether the Black Mesa Lag is appearing or not.
That’s it. We hope this guide was useful to you. You can comment below for any queries.
