Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 190 posts

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

#111

Post by justsomehnguy »

lynguist wrote: post #109

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.

> Prescott-256 3.06GHz (Intel Pentium 4 based Celeron D)

     how does one explain the difference between celeron and non celeron to a non tech ??
     one is for toasting bread
     the other is for processing instructions
http://bash.org/?769729

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

#112

Post by epolanski »

Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate.

Basically with a solid GeForce 4 series card you could already cap the 100 fps framerate on Half-Life, but update to a much more powerful 9600 pro and framerate would start getting much more lower. The Quake 1 engine would be so old that getting better GPUs would make it run worse.

Also, another fun fact about HL is that scaled massively on ram frequencies. You would get a higher boost in framerate by overclocking your ram than your cpu or gpu.

It was only in late 2000s and the era of much more powerful 6th series that solid 100 fps on counter strike 1.6 were a given.

I miss that era of the internet, when socializing on irc and public servers was the norm, players controlled the servers rather than companies. Today we have replaced all of this infrastructure with ease of use and queue buttons and playing online leads to barely beyond any meaningful and short lived interaction.

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

#113

Post by _fat_santa »

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.

One of my fondest memories around Crysis is the whole "but can it run Crysis" unofficial benchmark. I remember everyone looking at the game going "yeah my machine can't run this". Ended up the game ran pretty well even on my potato machine back then, just had to keep all the graphics on low. I'm kind of tempted to buy the remastered version and see how much better it looks on my Xbox Series S like a decade later

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

#114

Post by justsomehnguy »

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.

> how much RAM my PC back in HL2 days had I would have said probably 4GiB

Probably 512MB or 1024MB. It was only 3 years after release of Windows XP. Vista came out in 2007 and even then people cried about what 512MB minimal requirements is way too much.

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

#115

Post by _fat_santa »

foliveira wrote: post #54
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)

Biggest differentiator being that back then most CPU's were single core - one of the first dual core CPUs was the Pentium D that only came out in 2005 iirc.

Back then having a "Dual Core" of "Quad Core" processor was such a selling point, I remember getting my first Macbook (white plastic one) thinking it was a beast for having a Core2 Duo. Then like a year later, my Android phone had a quad core processor inside.

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

#116

Post by jimbob45 »

epolanski wrote: post #112

Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Basically with a solid GeForce 4 series card you could already cap the 100 fps framerate on Half-Life, but update to a much more powerful 9600 pro and framerate would start getting much more lower. The Quake 1 engine would be so old that getting better GPUs would make it run worse. Also, another fun fact about HL is that scal…

On that note, I still regularly get extremely bad FPS on Quake-based games today with my RX 580. Only renaming the executable seems to solve the issue.

https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-atis-drivers-optimize...

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

#117

Post by mekkkkkk »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #105
mekkkkkk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I'm sure there are some significant downsides to Steam being a dominant platform, as is always the case. That being said, I think Steam has been pretty decent for Indie devs in other ways. The Greenlight program seems pretty successful, and the barrier for entry into the Steam catalog isn't too steep. However, you are right in that you are pretty much forcing indie devs to come in under the Steam umbrella to get exposure, and that's of course questionable.

As for pure practicality as a gamer, Steam was unbeatable in the 10's. There were a lot of other offerings like you mentioned, but none were really competing on a large scale. The push of every publisher to restrict their games to their own Steam clones is a thing that seems to really have ramped up during the last ten years or so. Some were early though, Blizzard being a prime example.

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

#119

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

epolanski wrote: post #112

Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Basically with a solid GeForce 4 series card you could already cap the 100 fps framerate on Half-Life, but update to a much more powerful 9600 pro and framerate would start getting much more lower. The Quake 1 engine would be so old that getting better GPUs would make it run worse. Also, another fun fact about HL is that scal…

>Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate.

Sounds more like a specific technical issue with an specific engine and drivers that lacked optimization rather than an axiom that can generalize games and GPUs for several years. If you have a source for this please share it.

Also, IIRC, back then the game physics were tied to the framerate, so having too high framerate made your gameplay completely wonky as it messed up character jumps and weapon balistics, so I assume that those framerate limits with more powerful GPUs could have been there on purpose to keep the game playable.

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

#120

Post by Thlom »

globular-toast wrote: post #51
Svip wrote: post #35

What's the difference between "Korean (Teen)" and "Korean (Adult)"? I did not realise Steam had that language distinction. Do they still have it?

Is there perhaps some kind of legal thing where they turn off the red blood for the "teen" version?

That's Germany I think? I seem to remember playing Carmageddon with green blood and that was some kind of German mode?
Post reply on HN