Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

Re:Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004) by RF_Savage on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @12:24PM (#30934097)

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. :)

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Re:Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004) by ridgered4 on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @01:19PM (#30934951)

There was a very different attitude to budget offerings from nvidia back then, and despite a lot of complaints about them I'm not sure the new way is better.

Nvidia seemed to like to take their old hardware design and crank it up a bit, slap a new version on it and sell it as a budget offering. No new features, but it did a respectable job of playing older games which is what I think most people want out of a cheapo card. Later offerings usually featured super cut down cards that had more of the new features but not really enough power to actually turn them on and get playable framerates. And that is how things have sort of gone since then.

Like you said, the GF4 MX440 was actually a decent performing card. Sure, you were stuck with DX7 rendering path but it did a good job with it.

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Re:Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004) by anthk on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @02:14PM (#30935565)

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

Crazy. It was crazy.

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