In reply to:

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I find that quite surprising. I'd think that GDC would be an important event for a game company.

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You'd think that... until you go and realize it's been taken over by Marketing Workshops.
It's really just a big excuse for copious drinking...

And in regards to your "smoking problem", I haven't noticed that on my Nvidia cards. I don't have it here, but this cigarette effect is a series of translucent particles? Whoa... I just reread your original post. The wall splatters in Half-life are translucent textures on a plane placed just above the world geometry... I've never had that jittering slow down you talk about with those.

Sorry, but I can't even think of what could be wrong in that case. Nvidia's cards have always been pretty good with translucency. The old Power VR chips, like in the Dreamcast... those had really bad overlapping translucency problems due to some crazy tile based rendering stuff. I'll bang on Unreal2/Half-Life when I get home tonight to see if I can't recreate this problem.