HL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
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Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#42I have nostalgia for the games of that era far more than the hardware. While the hardware has come leaps and bounds, the gameplay has gone backwards. Take battlefield as an example; back then it was a tactical team-based shooter, today it's a gallery shooter. Same thing with the Crysis series; every entry got dumbed down.
The Crysis 1 -> 2 experience felt so disappointing. I loved how Crysis 1 there were no limits to the weapon attachments or switching suit functions. I remember Crysis 1 with the silenced pistols with laser pointers you would 100% hit where the laser was pointing. I'd go full cheese and sneak up to the enemy, de-cloak, 1 shot dead, re-cloak. All to push a story which started with an off screen killing of Nomad.
I remember pushing the limits of "fast" gameplay with really fast suit mode switching, and before that modifying the suit values in an .ini file in the game directory to have flash-level speed and infinite energy.
It's a shame that they dumbed it down in the sequels so much for the consoles. And that the game became so much worse _as a game_ (even if my first play through had my jaw hit the floor when I entered the alient ship) after the midpoint. Punching through plywood shacks for an ambush, jumping high for a grenade, using speedmode to get a flank (which the AI would be unaware of - if they couldn't see you!).
Yeah it was a good time.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#43The RAM! I've had 16GiB of RAM in my PC for almost 7 years at this point. If you'd have asked me how much RAM my PC back in HL2 days had I would have said probably 4GiB, but that's unlikely given the stats here. Interestingly I haven't felt the need to upgrade from 16GiB since and that seems to be standard on "developer spec" laptops even today.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#44I haven't realized SSE2 is so old. Almost half of the machines had it back then already.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#45I remember running Half Life 2 on some card way below the recommended spec. There was some commandline switch to run the game in DX7 or DX8 mode, turned everything to lowest and resolution like 640x480. Looked worse than Half Life 1, but at least was somewhat playable.
Some people managed to run Doom 3 on Voodoo 2/3 cards, applying some patches and resizing the game textures, etc...
I managed to run Doom 3 on a Creative GeForce 2 MX DDR using the patches for Voodoo 2 and doing the same trick of resizing textures. The game was playable, except for the boss guarding the soul cube.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#46Amazing 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...
I don’t think it’s the electrons moving that matter. It’s the electric fields, which in conducting materials, is approaching the speed of light.
The latency you’re thinking of is more related to the speed with which a semiconductor can change from conducting to non-conducting states.
The speed of electrons in a wire with a potential difference across is it is actually quite slow (cm/s or so).
Also, modern chips and electronics aren’t significantly larger in a physical sense, the wires/traces aren’t longer, but the density of transistors has increased.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#47I have nostalgia for the games of that era far more than the hardware. While the hardware has come leaps and bounds, the gameplay has gone backwards. Take battlefield as an example; back then it was a tactical team-based shooter, today it's a gallery shooter. Same thing with the Crysis series; every entry got dumbed down.
I guess some individual series have gotten worse. Debatably the monetization models have gotten worse too. But I think game design has generally improved. I loved Half life, but is the gameplay really better than games like Doom Eternal and Titanfall 2?
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#48OpenGL was and is a nice thing.
Linux was missing. Fixed ten years later :)
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#49Earlier 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.
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.
> elbow grease and ingenuity can remove theoretical hardware limitations
Of course, 'theoretical' hardware limitations aren't hard limits -- they're soft[ware] ones. However, if you find yourself battling concrete hardware limitations, what you need is to put your back into it and a little know-how.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#50HL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.
When HL2 came out we were forced to install Steam whether we liked it or not. I hated it at the time because I bought the game on DVD (as was usual at the time) and just wanted to play it. I was on 56k dial-up and didn't want to be forced to download updates. I remember thinking they must have been completely crazy to do this.
It was about a year before always-on broadband became widespread for everyone. Then it all made sense. It seemed to me Valve wasn't just riding the wave but actively driving it.