AMD 46%
Intel 54%
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
91–100 of 190 posts
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#92Wow, I never realized how much the cpu clocks have stagnated in the last two decades.
Well the clock speed of a Pentium 4 from back then isn’t exactly comparable to a Core i9 from today. Heck it wasn’t comparable to AMD’s offerings at the time which IIRC were uniformly 2.5GHz
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#93Take a moment for the 32k people using Windows Me. We will remember them.
My parents got me a brand new computer in 2001.
I think it was a PIII 700mhz with 64mb of ram and onboard graphics. Day 1 windows me wouldn’t boot past a blinking cursor. I had to reset it a random number of times and it would successfully boot. Some time after through who knows what (didn’t even have an internet connection, only CDs), I figured that if I uninstalled the USB devices before shut down it would boot fine in one shot.
I believe Windows Me is the reason I was way ahead in IT troubleshooting in high school and got me a position at a pretty good company which that led to my career in IT. We didn’t have money to pay a tech very often to fix our stuff so I had to bang my head through keeping that shit running so I could play Driver, CS 1.6 with bots and Test Drive 5.
That computer kept running until 2008 somehow. I upped the ram to 256 by scavenging the recycling pile at work and it would do OK opening google and writing word docs
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A team fan of that game is making a game named "Ready or Not", I didn't played it yet but it has stupid high fan reviews... I saw it reach 98% of approval on Steam or something like that.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#95That'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.
Thanks. I must have misremembered when I completed the survey
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#96Earlier 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.
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 :)
I still have mine - it came with my 9800 XT. The last AGP card I ever owned.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#97HL2, 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…
A lot of us predicted horrible things would come from Steam. Ads everywhere, forced updates, forced removal of games for all kinds of bullshit reasons, etc. Basically all the same arguments you get today about digital ownership and platforms. Fortunately for us, Valve has actually been a pretty good gaming-community citizen with Steam so we can happily say we were wrong.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#98I 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.
Haha yeah.
Depending on what games you were into, the term "Voodoo" in general may also unlock this part of your brain: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sHeuZ-m1tek
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#99HL2 is probably one of the last generation of FPS games that are accessible to general modders. Good time.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#100Earlier 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...
Unless I'm misremembering, the first dual-core CPU on the market was the Athlon 64 X2 in 2005, so I agree that these results are likely from servers running Steam.
Edit: a quick bit of google tells me both Intel and AMD released dual core CPUs in May 2005, with Intel beating AMD by a few weeks, so there you go.