Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

Post by danbee » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 10:32 PM UTC

exfascist wrote: post #175

paulmd wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could be wrong (I never really got into gaming as GMA950+Linux was an exceptionally bad combo for it) but I thought source was exclusively DirectX back then.

Post by kevingadd » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 12:39 AM UTC

Vecr wrote: post #154

kevingadd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In that case you might want to mask off some of the cores/hyperthreads, or even do core pinning. That's very common in applications where latency is important.

Post by flakyfilibuster » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #103

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.

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.

Post by goosedragons » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 10:03 AM UTC

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…

Post by paulmd » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 7:09 PM UTC

exfascist wrote: post #175

paulmd wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could be wrong (I never really got into gaming as GMA950+Linux was an exceptionally bad combo for it) but I thought source was exclusively DirectX back then.