Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004) • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by neogodless » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

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Amazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)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

May 25, 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_D

May 2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64_X2

What a race! Looks like the era of 90nm processing, and Intel just beating AMD to the punch, with both of them moving to 65nm in 2006!

Anandtech preview of Pentium D in April 2005.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1657

Anandtech preview of Athlon 64 X2 in April 2005.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1665

Review of Athlon 64 X2 May 2005!

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1676

> Both AMD and Intel appear to be playing release date games with their latest dual core processors.

> Intel's affordable dual core desktop solution, the new Pentium D, officially launched in the middle of last month, but has yet to be seen in the channel.

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

#142

Post by bpye » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

I miss the prevalence of IRC. I understand why platforms like Discord are popular today, but I’ve always felt that it missed the mark…

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

#143

Post by westpfelia » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:22 PM UTC

marcellus23 wrote: post #124

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.

LOVE Squad! I could not imagine that game with OWI hosted servers. Especially with the mod scene that game has.

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

#144

Post by westpfelia » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

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.

Back then to me a "tactical" Battlefield would have been either Battlefield 2(Especially Project Reality) or 2042. Maybe if you only compare it to modern games you could say 1942 was tactical.

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

#145

Post by RF_Savage » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

filmor wrote: post #70

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…

The GeForce 4 MX (first in the list) was a rebranded GeForce 2, so just T&L and no shaders. The "real" GeForce 4 (second in the list) supported shaders just fine, as did the GeForce 3, so it got the pretty water.

And yet, my box with a 50eur GeForce4 MX440 with 64mb VRAM ran Half-Life 2 on launch.

AMD Duron 1800+ and 256mb of 333MHz DDR and the damn thing ran HL2!

A machine with a 50eur CPU and 50eur GPU ran it! They must have optimized it well.

And that machine is included in that 2004 Steam hardware survey. :)

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

#146

Post by epolanski » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

packersville wrote: post #133

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…

Your last few sentences really hit. This is what occurred to World of Warcraft. I've been playing the re-release of Classic WoW, Season of Mastery, and I find the experience much more compelling than any common day mass multi-player online experience.

Yes WoW is exactly the primary example of "arcadeization" as I call it and why companies should not listen to their vocal playerbase sometimes.

WoW went from a game where player interaction was the norm (both negative and positive), going to a dungeon was a massive adventure just for getting there, you would have meaningful interactions with other players, coordinating to get to a place, giving directions, traversing what felt a living world with living players. Also the opposite was true, you would dislike some people for how they acted or played or ganked, but all of that had human interaction at heart.

But then going to dungeons became a chore for acquiring tokens, and this all stopped being fun, and we got automatic queues and people barely speak to each other anymore, and if they do, it's for insulting a player for a bad pull or for not waiting the healer.

It's sad but I believe that modern online gaming exchanged meaningful and durable human interactions for ease of use and quick consumption.

I remember talking to thousands of people and knowing pretty much everyone in a hundred of Counter Strike clans in Italy 20 years ago.

This image [1] will be 20 years old in few months, this is the SMAU Italian Lan Party 2002. 1200 PC gamers brought their own computers, setup up a giant lan, to meet and interact and fight each other and form friendships in the same place! 1200! 20 years ago!

Today it's a miracle if you can get few dozens people to play in the same place, there's barely any human interaction from gamers, neither in person nor online.

It's sad, maybe I'm just old and it's nostalgia, but I liked it more as it was before.

[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRm_T4I...

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

#147

Post by MisterTea » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Yup. Slowly stopped playing TF2 once the Valve server and queue crap started in. I liked community servers and was a paying No Heroes member. I liked popping in and seeing familiar faces and saying hello. I liked community maps (less common as time went on). I loved community quirks. e.g. servers using their own sound packs creating in jokes and seeing people outside of the community. It was fun until the community was instantly paved over by shiny hip new instant play and queues.

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

#148

Post by Ancapistani » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

marcellus23 wrote: post #124

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.

I spend _way_ too much time playing Squad.

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

#149

Post by tikkabhuna » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #113

tikkabhuna wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes definitely! Being more of a sandbox game offering different play styles I always gave it a go when I upgraded my PC.

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

#150

Post by paulmd » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

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…

specifically, it sounds to me like ATI/AMD's rather-notoriously-poor OpenGL performance in action... another way to rephrase OP to take the emphasis off hardware generation (which makes no sense) would be "when I switched from NVIDIA to ATI I lost 40% of my performance"... which is still an experience many people have today with OpenGL on the AMD cards.