NVidia Riva TNT2 Series! I spent the better part of a summer doing odd jobs to earn enough to purchase one from the local Electronic's Boutique. Great memories :)
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
11–20 of 190 posts
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#12Amazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)
Interesting, let's take a look at the instructions per clock. Oh, yikes.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-380GHz...
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#13Amusing to see only 6 people having a quad core CPU.
The pentium D hadn't come out yet in 2004. Which quad core CPU's are you thinking of?
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#14I'd love to try that 127 bpp display they mention.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#15Amazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)
It always comes to intersection of physical world and computers. After all electrons can only move so fast that is so far in single clock cycle... And I think more complex chips are internally "longer"...
We could probably make some older generation chip now and run it much faster, but it is easier and more efficient to add lot more chip...
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#16These were the years of the GeForce 4 and the brand new amd64 processor. The Direct X version supported by GeForce 4 couldn’t even display the real pretty water textures at that time, or at least mine couldn’t on my GeForce 4 + amd64 laptop. Little guy was a beast back then. Compaq, I think? That game was so good and around that time, people were figuring out how to get HL2 to be multiplayer in story mode, and gmod w…
I recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it.
Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise.
And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#17These were the years of the GeForce 4 and the brand new amd64 processor. The Direct X version supported by GeForce 4 couldn’t even display the real pretty water textures at that time, or at least mine couldn’t on my GeForce 4 + amd64 laptop. Little guy was a beast back then. Compaq, I think? That game was so good and around that time, people were figuring out how to get HL2 to be multiplayer in story mode, and gmod w…
I recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it. Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise. And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
> came with Half-Life 2
I think mine came with Vietcong, which was... underwhelming.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#18There were still some users with a Voodoo 3, and some (few) poor people with a non-AMD and non-Intel x86 CPU...
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it. Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise. And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
> came with Half-Life 2 I think mine came with Vietcong, which was... underwhelming.
Nope, I got a 9600XT, and it came with a serial number for HL2. I added a Zalman cooler on top of that card, and it was both silent and stable.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#20These were the years of the GeForce 4 and the brand new amd64 processor. The Direct X version supported by GeForce 4 couldn’t even display the real pretty water textures at that time, or at least mine couldn’t on my GeForce 4 + amd64 laptop. Little guy was a beast back then. Compaq, I think? That game was so good and around that time, people were figuring out how to get HL2 to be multiplayer in story mode, and gmod w…
I recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it. Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise. And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
Don't forget that Valve later rendered HDR on ATI 9600 series card with no perceivable performance penalty, and showed that elbow grease and ingenuity can remove theoretical hardware limitations.
Also, I remember that quote (from Gabe himself, I think): "We may have polished graphics further, but that game won't be Half Life anymore.", a direct stab taken at linearity of Doom of that time.