How to Disable Texture Filtering [DOES WORK! – 2020]

Overview

Texture filtering blurs sprites and the textures. Disabling texture filtering will unblur all textures giving your game a sharp, clean, pixelated look should you desire. This guide will teach you how to disable texture filtering for Half-Life, and will also work with all other GoldSrc engine games/mods like Blue Shift, Counter-Strike, etc. (You will only need to do this once to effect all other GoldSrc games).It’s also worth mentioning that Valve issued patches and bug fixes to all currently released Half-Life games as of late 2019 (which is great). These new patches don’t allow texture filtering to enabled the “traditional” way though, so this should serve as the most up-to-date and reliable guide available if you don’t want blurry textures.

Entering the Game Files

First you will need to dive into Half-Life’s file directory. If you already know how to do that you can skip ahead to the next step. If you don’t, then continue reading.

You can get there by navigating your computer’s harddrive if you know how to, or accessing it through Steam. To access Half-Life’s file directory through Steam, find Half-Life in your Steam library list, right click on it, and select the ‘Properties’ tab. A window will pop up with several tabs located at the top. Select the top tab the reads ‘Local Files’, and then click on the first option ‘Browse Local Files’.

Creating Code

Once in your game’s directory, enter the folder titled ‘valve’, (not ‘valve_hd’). Scroll down until you find a file called ‘userconfig.cfg’. If there is no userconfig.cfg file, create one with the program Notepad and change the ‘.txt’ file extension to ‘.cfg’. Copy and past the following lines into your userconfig file, then save and exit.

gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_LINEAR
gl_ansio “0”
gl_round_down “0”

NOTE: I suggest copying this .cfg file as a back up if you ever uninstall Half-Life 1 and plan on keeping this. Move your spare copy some place on your computer where it won’t be disturbed.

Done!

Close out of Half-Life’s file directory and all the other windows that were opened previously. Launch Half-Life, and all texture filtering should be completely disabled.

Why The Other Ways No Longer Work

As mentioned in the introduction, Valve issued patches to all GoldSrc games like Half-Life. Usually the lines of code you copied and pasted into your userconfig.cfg file would either go in an autoexec.cfg (auto-executable) or be typed in the launch options window, but Valve’s patching bypasses both of these completely.

You can’t set any default code in the main configuration file (config.cfg) either as it’s programmed to re-write itself back to stock every time Half-Life is launched.
The only way to set your own code as default now is through the userconfig.cfg, which is executed by the end of the main configuration file’s list and never bothered.