That's odd - I'm sure I remember completing that survey - and I was playing on Mac, but there are no Mac stats.
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
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Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#72These 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.
The Radeon cards came with coupons for HL2 a while before the game was released. My brother bought one from someone in school, there was quite a bit of trading going on :)
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#73That's odd - I'm sure I remember completing that survey - and I was playing on Mac, but there are no Mac stats.
Steam for Mac (and HL2 for Mac as well) only came out in 2010. In 2004, you're also still very much in the PowerPC era, so you wouldn't have been able to play the game on a Mac without some serious emulation effort.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Yes, the soundtrack and setting was objectively the best part of that game
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#75The Geforce 2 MX and (to a lesser extent) Geforce 4 MX were spectacular little cards for the price when they came out, I'm not surprised they occupy first and third place in the Graphics card rankings. Also I am curious who was running Steam on a computer with <24MB of RAM in 2004, that seems ... odd.
The Geforce 4 MX was a rip-off, trying to extract money from people who didn't know better. It lacked shaders entirely, so it was, feature-wise, on the same level as the first GF from 1999.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#76Amazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)
IPC and caches have grown a lot (and obviously core count, dramatically).
A 2000 to 2005 ish pentium might have 50 to 200 million transistors, an M1 Pro is more like 12 billion.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#77Amazing 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...
Aren't you comparing a fairly high end processor at the time (I wasn't alive when the pentium 4 came out, I think) with the bargain bin one from today? The new pentiums have the same microarchitecture but I don't know if they have all the execution units turned on + less cache.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#78These 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…
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Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#79These 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.
Kid me got burned so hard by this. Upgraded my GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce 4 MX. It was slightly better and had I think 4 times the VRAM but I learned to pay a lot more attention after that.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#80Take a moment for the 32k people using Windows Me. We will remember them.
Some people don’t know you have to skip the odd ones. There’s even people who like Star Trek vii.