CPU frequencies didn't go up much in the last 20 years
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
61–70 of 190 posts
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#62The 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.
I just looked through my emails, in 2008 I bought an "Ultra DIMM 2 GB DDR2-667 Kit" :D
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#63Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it. Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise. And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
> came with Half-Life 2 I think mine came with Vietcong, which was... underwhelming.
Just shows how big the markup was, to be able to bundle a 60$ game with a 300$ card.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#65HL2, 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…
Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though.
I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start.
On the other hand, we can see what the success has caused down the line. Now every publisher wants to replicate it with their own proprietary launchers, undoing all of the cleanliness and centralization that made Steam awesome in the first place.
If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where.
I suppose the total Steam hegemony was always going to be a temporary thing.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though. I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start. On the oth…
> Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though.
It did but it still had problems. You did indeed have to be online initially to "activate" the game but the main problem is whenever it detected there were updates available you were forced to wait for them to completely download before you could play. This led to me being very careful about when I would allow Steam to have internet access. If you weren't careful you could go online and then not be allowed to play HL2 until you spent hours downloading an update (which you couldn't always do until night time because of tying up the phone line). It was incredibly frustrating.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#67What's the difference between "Korean (Teen)" and "Korean (Adult)"? I did not realise Steam had that language distinction. Do they still have it?
the difference for teens is caused by korea gaming laws, if i'm not wrong games have to limit the play time for 3 hours a day
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#68The 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.
I just looked through my emails, in 2008 I bought an "Ultra DIMM 2 GB DDR2-667 Kit" :D
I just looked through mine and I built a PC in 2006 with a 2GiB DDR2 kit. I later upgraded it with another of the same kit in 2008. If you go to late 2008 in the archive all of a sudden almost 40% of people are in the "2Gb[sic] and above" category.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 limi…
My apologies, I read too deeply into your comment. I just enjoyed (too much) the use of the phrase 'theoretical hardware limitations'.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#70These 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…
The GeForce 4 MX (first in the list) was a rebranded GeForce 2, so just T&L and no shaders. The "real" GeForce 4 (second in the list) supported shaders just fine, as did the GeForce 3, so it got the pretty water.