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Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

gattilorenz wrote: post #17
samplatt wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by fps-hero »

PebblesHD wrote: post #4

Very curious what the rest of the setups looked like for the 0.02% of people with a 1920 wide screen display back then…

CRTs were all 4:3, and had better specifications than the LCDs of the time. Back then LCDs also followed PC standard 4:3 resolution. It wasn’t until LCD tech was cheap enough for mass production in TVs that 1080p monitors became the norm.

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

#103

Post by markus_zhang »

tikkabhuna wrote: post #34
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.

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.

Yeah absolutely. The dumb down of the story almost killed me back then. I had so much hope for Crysis 2 but was disappointed that it was just an ordinary shooter with meh enemies. The tech is there but the design is way worse.

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

#104

Post by vehemenz »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #41

HL2, 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.

Probably more due to Half-Life, TFC, and CS. The enormous player bases were forced to adopt Steam. And then Valve continued to put a few more good games.

Honestly CS:S was a bit of a miss—largely considered a failure by the 1.6 community—but it didn’t matter because TF2 came out and was a smash hit.

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

#105

Post by BlueTemplar »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #65
globular-toast wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Steam wouldn't have happened if Windows had a proper package manager (and if Valve hadn't been screwed over by Sierra).

I'm wondering about what cleanliness you are talking about, after all Steam (thankfully) never got a 100% market share (Games For Windows Live, Stardock's Impulse, GamersGate, Matrix/Slitherine, Blizzard games, Good Old Games, Ubisoft's horrible launchers, various boxes-only games, indies...) - if anything it has killed indie gaming that was briefly freed from having to have a full blown publisher and physical distributor - these days smaller developers have a hard time to sell from their own website and sometimes even to just forego from using Steamworks-only services (which make non-Steam versions second class citizens) like multiplayer matchmaking and mod Workshop.

(And some other programs like Xfire have tried to centralize game libraries too, also offering other services like chat, matchmaking, game hour counts, video recording and upload...)

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

#106

Post by FieryTransition »

t-writescode wrote: post #9

These 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…

So today you would do it all in a programmable shader pipeline, create and update vertices according to some displacement from a 2d water simulation or just noise, and color the appropriately in another pass with the correct texture etc. As far as I know with my limited understanding from writing a few shaders.

But what did you do back then? I was pretty young, but I'm not even sure you had such a clean programmable separation in the render pipeline? :-)

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

#107

Post by BlueTemplar »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #97
globular-toast wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

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.

Forced updates did happen (only way to play the game if Steam was aware there was one available - and God forbid you had a slow/flaky connection - no gaming for you today, not even through Offline Mode !).

Combined in at least one instance with the new version not being able to load the old multi-hours save, and no rollbacks, so hopefully you manually backed up the whole game ! (At least the devs fixed it in a patch after some days...)

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

#108

Post by globular-toast »

gruturo wrote: post #87
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 woe…

I totally forgot about the 32/64 bit thing! I can't remember ever being concerned with it. I never used Windows beyond XP and switched to Linux full time around 2010 so I guess it didn't really affect me.

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

#109

Post by lynguist »

I know exactly my hardware stats of that time:

Prescott-256 3.06GHz (Intel Pentium 4 based Celeron D) 1 GB RAM ATI 9250 300kbit/s Internet

I was sad when I realized that we had a “budget” PC that couldn’t run the latest 3D games even though it was so expensive to buy.

We had bought the computer with monthly installments.

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

#110

Post by BlueTemplar »

gruturo wrote: post #87
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 woe…

64 bit Windows 7 Home is still artificially limited to 16 Go of RAM, I lost a day trying to figure out a couple of years ago why my extra RAM was showing up in BIOS, Ubuntu and Memtest, but not Windows !
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