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Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

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

#161

Post by monocasa »

FieryTransition wrote: post #106
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…

For the geometry you'd do basically the same thing but on the CPU and just update a vertex buffer every frame.

You'd probably do some cute register combiner trick for the texturing. You can kinda think of register combiner stages as pixel shader instructions. And in hardware of the time they're the same thing. On GeForce 3, loading a pixel shader is just blitting the register combiner hardware config registers all at once. GeForce 2 could have had a shader model version 0.5 or something with only four instructions if they wanted to expose it in the API like that.

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

#162

Post by anthk »

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…

Was it an MX series? They sucked.

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

#163

Post by anthk »

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.

I had a Geforce 2MX 200/400 back in the day. It was... interesting.

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

#164

Post by anthk »

RF_Savage wrote: post #145
filmor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

AMD Athlon XP, 256 MB DDR2, GF2 MX 200/400. HL2 ran.

Crazy. It was crazy.

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

#165

Post by Stevvo »

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.

Referring to BF1942, I mean tactical in the sense that you had to cooperate on tactics with your team, for example you might spend 10 minutes traversing a hill to flank the enemy. In the modern games, flanking is redundant as you respawn just a few meters from wherever you died.

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

#166

Post by alexklark »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#167

Post by BlueTemplar »

ridgered4 wrote: post #159
BlueTemplar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd say if I have one big complaint about Steam, it's that it's update control needs work. I don't know if it's intentional or not but rolling back to an old version is...impossible? I'm vaguely aware there is an option to maintain the version you already have but I believe it's quite buried. I've had updates completely change game balance, making character load outs I'd grinded up not work the way they did before. I…

Some devs enable (an often limited form of) rollback through the "beta" functionality.

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

#169

Post by brimble »

jim180 wrote: post #38
brainwipe wrote: post #37

Take a moment for the 32k people using Windows Me. We will remember them.

What's funny, that I had friends who were running Windows Me very successfully, without any issues whatsoever and they liked Windows Me. I guess, they were lucky in that regard. Mine experiences was totally different.

Part of my job was tech support at the time.

ME was notably worse than everything else. IIRC they also decided to screw around with placement of stuff on a bunch of settings screens for no reason, adding insult to injury.

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

#170

Post by brimble »

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.

I'd still be fine with 8GB, aside from Electron shitware eating 25+% of that for one app, and virtual machines being memory-hungry.
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