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Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

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

#121

Post by leonardp »

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…

When reading through your comment I had a blast from the past and remembered how I was browsing the "All-Seeing Eye" [1] to look for Quake 3 servers and then share them with friends via IRC.

Looking back at those times I remember the Internet as a much more social place (but that might be just be). I think it's because people had to get active to use services for social interaction as opposed to getting hit by a notification in your face.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_All-Seeing_Eye

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

#122

Post by kevingadd »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #119
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 mad…

In the modern era we still have problems of this sort - higher core counts can cause games to perform worse due to problems like a game suddenly having 96+ threadpool threads competing for small amounts of work, often belonging to the driver. It's still the case that a high core count Ryzen will have worse performance in some games (or problems like microstuttering) that you won't experience on a slower, lower core count Intel chip.

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

#124

Post by marcellus23 »

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…

> players controlled the servers rather than companies

There are still some games like this! Admittedly fewer and fewer, but I've been enjoying Squad for example — a tactical FPS that encourages teamwork. Lots of great public servers with good communities.

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

#125

Post by nemo1618 »

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.

Crysis 1 was definitely more fun. Tranq darts, freeze rays, throwing frying pans with Maximum Strength, "hacking" your .ini file to make yourself absurdly overpowered, etc.

But I have to give Crysis 2 credit for its graphics. Compared to 1, it had a smoother, more cinematic quality. I distinctly remember the opening "cutscene" ending and seamlessly transferring control to the player, revealing that it wasn't a prerendered cutscene at all -- they were doing it live! I just sat there stunned for a minute in disbelief.

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

#126

Post by phire »

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…

The monitor would have been something like this HP L2335 LCD monitor from 2004 (this [1] review is from 2005).

According to benchmarks [2], Half Life 2 was pretty vertex and/or cpu bound, so a mid-to-high range GPU ($300-$400) would be able to run at that resolution.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/1729/2

[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/1546/

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

#128

Post by JTbane »

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 totally agree, seems most FPS today do not come close to the story and gunplay of HL2.

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

#129

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

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.

Loaded up the Ubisoft app recently. Pure trash, apps / syncing wouldn’t work till I accepted all cookies, things wouldn’t download in the background while playing single player, etc.

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

#130

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

kevingadd wrote: post #122
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 mad…

In the modern era we still have problems of this sort - higher core counts can cause games to perform worse due to problems like a game suddenly having 96+ threadpool threads competing for small amounts of work, often belonging to the driver. It's still the case that a high core count Ryzen will have worse performance in some games (or problems like microstuttering) that you won't experience on a slower, lower core c…

That's because game devs optimize for the most common denominator hardware gamers have at home, which were mostly quad core chips with 8 threads until very recently.

96+ thread pool is way outside the norm for the average gamer or consumer, so you can't expect to be surprised that game devs ignore the 0.01% of gamers running server/workstation CPUs with this insane thread count.

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