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Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

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Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#81

Post by smcl »

filmor wrote: post #75
smcl wrote: post #30

The 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.

Yeah, while the GF2MX was a stripped down GF2 the GF4MX was NOT a stripped down GF4, rather a slightly improved GF2MX. My feeling at the time was that the original MX was powerful enough for most and ate into sales of the higher end GF 2 GTS cards.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#82

Post by bayindirh »

qwery wrote: post #69
bayindirh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

No worries, enjoy your stay. :)

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#83

Post by gruturo »

Ekaros wrote: post #15
bawolff wrote: post #3

Amazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)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...

The P4-era Intel Netburst pipeline, in order to chase the highest clock speed, at some point (Prescott) degenerated from 20 stages into a 31-stages deep abomination (which would suffer so badly at any branch mispredict).

The pipeline actually has a couple stages called "Drive"... allegedly for allowing signals to propagate between key areas in the CPU.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#84

Post by rekoil »

capableweb wrote: post #36
Stevvo wrote: post #22

I 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'm not really sure which Battlefield you're referring to as "tactical team-based shooter" but it was never any Rainbow Six (3), Swat 3, ARMA or Operation Flashpoint, games I'd consider actual tactical games in the 2000s. Battlefield has always been a bit arcade-y, not not as much as Call of Duty.

Oh man, SWAT 4 was SO good. I miss that game.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#85

Post by cheschire »

Ekaros wrote: post #52
phire wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I’m guessing it was game server software running on rack mounted servers.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#87

Post by gruturo »

globular-toast wrote: post #43

The 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.

Until 64 bit CPUs and OSes became mainstream, it was not easy to use more than 4GB on a 32bit system (or even 2 in Windows XP, later raised to 3.1-3.5-ish with the /3GB switch in boot.ini).

You had to use PAE (Physical Address Extensions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension ), basically a 3-level page table structure, provided the CPU and the OS offered it.

It could cause a few compatibility woes with binaries not expecting it, esp. stuff running in kernel mode, and of course in the Microsoft world it was used as an excuse to charge you more - the "Standard" versions of Windows server x32 were limited to 4GB, forcing you to buy "Advanced/Enterprise/Datacenter/Whatever" SKUs.

So anyway 4GB was the maximum it would make sense to install on Windows for a long time, pretty much until 64 bit CPUs and Windows 7 became common (Deliberately omitting Vista, which so many opted to skip).

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#89

Post by culopatin »

TestSIM1 wrote: post #23

My dad bought me HL2 back in Nov 2004. At the time my PC spec was: P4, 512 RAM, GF FX5900XT, HDD 80Gb, Dial up 56k, LCD BenQ 1280x1024, Win XP. The game was in English and I didn't speak it at all at the time so had to download the translation (700Mb audio files). Took me a couple days. With constant disconnects as dial up wasn't really reliable. Luckily, Steam allowed you to resume the download. Still using that Ste…

Ahh I had a lowly fx5200 and dreamed of the day of being able to afford a better card. But that meant skipping 6 months of lunches and by then I’m sure the better card would not be compatible with my motherboard anymore anyway.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#90

Post by stevecat »

nickjj wrote: post #88

I wonder how much of the 1.8% "Other" video cards is a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee. It came out at about the same time as the Voodoo 3 and was more of a budget friendly but still good card.

I feel like the words "3dfx Voodoo Banshee" just unlocked a part of my brain, full of IRQ conflicts and blue screens, that I had been keeping firmly closed.
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