What's the difference between "Korean (Teen)" and "Korean (Adult)"? I did not realise Steam had that language distinction. Do they still have it?
Is there perhaps some kind of legal thing where they turn off the red blood for the "teen" version?
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
51–60 of 190 posts
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those were most likely people with a motherboard with 4 CPU slots and with 4 CPUs plonked in there.
I was going to suggest it could be dual-socket, with HyperThreading enabled, but looks like the survey is HyperThreading aware and only counts real cores. So must be Quad Socket motherboards.
I don't think there was even any dual dual-core solutions for x86 available in 2004... So must have been some quad socket weirdness...
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#53Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#54Amazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)
Biggest differentiator being that back then most CPU's were single core - one of the first dual core CPUs was the Pentium D that only came out in 2005 iirc.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The thing is, HDR is considered too expensive and impossible on these cards without specific hardware capabilities and relevant API support.
Valve said "Ha, let's see!" and implemented great HDR visuals with integers only. So it's not just let's hack together and see how it goes. IIRC, it took three re-implementations to get it right and performant.
Similarly, I'm not a stranger when it comes to hardware and its limits, but what deemed impossible by many, even knowledgeable people, doesn't mean it's a hard, cold truth (e.g. demoscene and PoC||GTFO).
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#56I 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.
The multiplayer of Crysis 1 was unique. I wish "something" happens to either bring back some people to the old one (there are ways to play it after the official servers shut down, but the community is dead), a new mod, or the multiplayer being added to the official remastered version.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#57It's fun to think I'm some data in that survey, as it feels like a lifetime ago now. I was on team ATI and team Intel back then, now team Nvidia and AMD. Given that AMD bought ATI, I guess the only loser there was Intel.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#58The survey looks like it picked up a couple of corrupted CPU Vendor strings like cAMD, ntel, and €. I wonder what happened?
Overclocking was pretty common (and I guess might still be in gaming communities) so I wouldn't be surprised if some machines were unstable and running with corrupted memory.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#59Earlier 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.
Is that the game that had this in its soundtrack? https://youtu.be/fuYL-keoGvU
I still listen to it on occasion. Don’t even remember how I found that song because I’ve never played that game, I don’t think.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I got the 9600XT for Half-Life 2 which was kinda silly in the end since HL2 took so long to come out that I could have gotten a newer card. However I believe it also came with a copy of Counter-Strike Source Beta which I enjoyed greatly. My card had tiny LED's on it that prevented me from sleeping with my computer on. Great times.