HL2 on lesser machines

[Supertanker]

In case anyone is hesitating, I wanted to note that I'm getting good HL2 performance on a Ti4200 machine. This is with a P4 2.4, with 512MB memory, so that might be a factor too. I have it turned down to 800x600, but this game seems much more about textures than polygons so it still looks fantastic. I've got the latest Nvidia drivers and DX 9.0c installed.

I get just over 60 fps in the CS:Source video torture test at 1024x768, but HL2 is definitely a bigger hit on the system. Moving down to 800x600 and enabling vsync made the framerate very smooth, eliminated the control lag (a side effect of the low frame rate), and got rid of the image tearing. I didn't change any other video settings.

[Moore]

Same experience here, XP2000+, 1 gig ram, 4600ti, 800x600 everything but water on high. vsync on (bad tearing on my lcd without it)

runs fine, looks nicer than pretty much everything else.

[John Many Jars]

Hey, that's great to hear! No upgrade for me, then.

[Destarius]

Having a fantastic experience on my Athlon XP 2600+ with 1 gig RAM, and 9600XT, running at 1024x768 with all defaults on (including reflections). Stutters now and then, but as I'm not a framerate pokemon (gotta get them all!) it's been a tremendous experience. Well done Valve so making such a playable next generation game (Carmack can take his closet-monster game and stuff it).

[mutt]

I've got a P4 1.7 w/Radeon 9800. I like hi res, so I'm playing at 1280x1024 w/Medium settings. I haven't checked the frame rate, but it plays pretty well except for a brief hiccup here and there. Do you think I'd be better served lowering the res and upping the graphics settings? (The brief hiccups aren't that big of a deal. I'm more interested in whether the graphical tradeup is worth the loss in resolution?)

[Kunikos]

I have a 2.8Ghz P4c, 1024MB PC3200 RAM, VIA PT800 based board, GF4 Ti4400, hitachi sata 160gb 8mb cache, and it took for freaking ever for it to launch the first time. I also think it wasn't doing anything the first few times so i had to throw it a -dx8 switch to get it to go to the main menu at all (although maybe I was just being impatient). The game itself plays fairly well. Even with the settings set to "High" which the game recommended, although it is running in DX8, it looks pretty nice to me. I'm running in 1024x768, and it feels fairly nice. Sometimes the game will hiccup and repeat a sound a couple times and everything freezes though. Also, the first time loading the first level took for-fucking-ever.... Load times are generally not terribly bad but they happen fairly often at the beginning.

[TimElhajj]

Good deal. According to what I wrote in the other thread, I am supposed to be waiting for Christamas to purchase/play Half Life 2. But now that I know my Ti4200 isn't really that big a deal, I may end up being naughty this Christmas.

[Incendiary Lemon]

PIV B 2.66
1 Gig at 2700
9600xt

Visuals set to high with 2xAA and 4xAF. I consider it quite playable but I'm the tolerant sort. I would runs fraps but I've got a nasty stutter thats taken hold, the game drops to a single frame with the worst, painful, clicking noise comming from the speakers.

Valve is apparently aware of the complaint.

[Supertanker]

Screenshot time. As noted above, P4 2.4, 512MB, Ti4200, taken at 800x600, default settings:

Firefight aftermath. (http://home.socal.rr.com/wohlenberg/firefight.jpg) The grenade explosion marks are from the fighting, and the cart is on its side because I stood on top of one end and it slowly turned over. Look how great the textures are - this place looks very real.

Train track area. (http://home.socal.rr.com/wohlenberg/tracks.jpg) I put this in because it shows the draw distances, and the tracks really show the texture quality reduction at a distance. Normally I don't even notice it, and a firefight started very soon after this & pulled me right back into the game.

The ladies love Cool Gordon. (http://home.socal.rr.com/wohlenberg/girlfight.jpg) This is to show the character models. They look like humans, and move very much like humans. Apparently most people's brains agree, because you keep seeing pictures like these:

Heh. (http://home.socal.rr.com/wohlenberg/butt1.jpg)

Heh-heh. (http://home.socal.rr.com/wohlenberg/butt2.jpg)

[sluggo]

A bunch of people here are playing with 2.4 GHz machines with 1GB RAM and Ti4600 vid cards. They're all running extremely smooth.

This doesn't seem to be a game that requires a video card upgrade, but if you have 512 MB RAM, upgrading to 1GB might give you a nice boost.

edit: 1MB --> 1GB. Also, I'm a moron.

[Moore]

1mb?

[Marcin]

1mb?

640k oughta be enough for anyone.

[Wholly Schmidt]

I may be about to find out how well it runs on a GeForce 2 GTS. I'll snap some screenshots if it comes to that.

[walTer]

AMD 2200
512 ram
Gf3ti200

800x600

Runs fine- I can detect some fps slow down but not engough for to be a real issue.

It looks wonderful... I do get an odd stutter now and then-- but so rarely I just ignore it.

[Bub, Andrew]

P4 1.9
GeForce 4 ti600

1024x768 res, no problems. Runs better than Doom 3 in fact!

[XPav]

AMD2400
1 GIG ram
ATI 9600 Pro
1024x768

Except for some stuttering sound, which I think I fixed by turning quality down to medium, its working pretty well.

[Incendiary Lemon]

the game drops to a single frame with the worst, painful, clicking noise comming from the speakers.

Defragging actually resolved the issue and did wonders for my load times. And again a messy hardrive could have been the reason for the hour+ it took to unlock yesterday.

[Mattc0m]

I'm on a AMD Athlon 2200, 256mb RAM piece, and a GeForce FX 5600 - and I'm noticing quite a bit of slowdowns a huge loading times (2+ minutes between areas). I'm assuming this is probably due to the very low amount of RAM, and hopefully with more the gameplay will increase dramactically.

[BrewersDroop]

Athlon 2400XP
1.5GB DDR
Radeon 9800Pro

1024x768, no FSAA, no AF. Runs like a champ. Image quality is great even at that resolution and without AA/AF. When I inadvertently forced 4xFSAA and 4xAF in the ATI control panel, the game stuttered horribly though, so make sure your control panel settings are application preference.

[Marcin]

I got you all beat. Except walTer, but he doesn't count since he thinks Doom III ran fine on his box (which is clearly impossible :D).

Athlon 1800+ XP
768 DDR266
GF4 Ti4600 128mb

1024x768, claims to be high detail.

Looks fantastic, runs well. Sound stutters on section load, and occasionally for no reason at all, even after turning it down to Low quality. When it doesn't stutter, it's smooth running. Better than Halo :D

Got it through Steam, authenticated & downloaded while I was playing City of Heroes. Took 2 hours, give or take. No issues at any part of the process, but the initial start-up either was taking FOREVER, or froze. I killed it, restarted, and it seemed to pop-in a bit a faster.

It looks like it scales very well.

[DrCrypt]

Since this thread is primarily aimed at higher spec "lesser" machines, I wanted to report what it ran like on my old beast. P1ghz, 512mb RAM, Radeon 9600... amazingly, runs pretty damn smooth. I've got most settings on either medium or high, except for shadows and reflective water. Resolution is 800x600. I do get some stuttering on level load and those loads aren't near-instantaneous, as they would be on a beefier machine, but honestly, it's very playable so far. It runs better than Halo PC on my machine, to put this in perspective. So if you're hugging minimum specs, I'd honestly say give it a shot. Everyone's right, it's absolutely phenomenal.

[walTer]

I'm on a AMD Athlon 2200, 256mb RAM piece, and a GeForce FX 5600 - and I'm noticing quite a bit of slowdowns a huge loading times (2+ minutes between areas). I'm assuming this is probably due to the very low amount of RAM, and hopefully with more the gameplay will increase dramactically.

Drop another stick of 256 ram in there-- I your troubles should be gone- i have the same processor and I am running fine and on a gf3ti200 as well.

[RedTide]

Ha you guys think those are "lesser machines"? Check this out:

256mb of RAM
Geforce 3 64MB Ti200
P4 2 GHZ

muhahhahahaa I shall rule the entire world!

[nutsak]

Athlon 1600+ (1.4Ghz)
GeforceFX 5200
512 meg of SDRAM ( yes, SD )

I run HL2 in 800x600 with shadows n low, shaders on high and everything else as default. It seems to run pretty well.

[Daagar]

You people have warped ideas of 'lesser' machines. Here is my dark age equipment:

933Mhz Athlon Tbird
512MB PC-133 SDRAM
Geforce 2 GTS

Jealous?


And you know what? HL2 plays fine.. sure, it is in 800x600 and most of the settings are at medium (yes, medium! Not even low!) but it still looks great and plays quite smooth. Yes, the load times can be a bit slow, and I haven't hit any super-heavy action yet. I haven't done any fps tests, but don't really need to.. it plays.

For comparison, Doom3 ran timedemo1 or whatever it was at 10fps with everything super low. Not playable, obviously. HL2 is. Quite impressive.

[Kalle]

For comparison, Doom3 ran timedemo1 or whatever it was at 10fps with everything super low. Not playable, obviously. HL2 is. Quite impressive.

But you can run Doom 3 on a Voodoo 2 (http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=15067). Can you run Half-life 2 on that? I think not. :wink:

[Supertanker]

Now for an update on an even lesser machine. My 4200 decided to die today, so I had to put my kids Radeon 9200 in as a stopgap. Framerate blows, I'd guess in the mid 20s somewhere, and the textures are much more blurry. All in all, it does scale down pretty well, but it threatens to give me a headache if I play much.

I had started playing through again with weapon cheats, so here's a nice picture of the physcannon holding a radiator in the first level, showing how the polygons decrease. It looks like a radiator made out of wood scraps (http://home.socal.rr.com/wohlenberg/hl29200.jpg). Note the blurry wallpaper texture, too.

[BooTx]

Yay, it should run fine on my 1 GHz T-Bird, 512 DDR, GF3 Ti200 system. Good news indeed.

[steve]

And for the opposite look, here's (http://www.manic-pop-thrills.com/temp/hfl2big1.jpg)a picture of it running at 1920x1200 with anisotropic filtering but no AA, and all detail maxed out. On an Athlon 4000 with a GeForce Ultra, I played through it the whole way like this, with only occasional framerate hiccups.

[Moore]

And for the opposite look, here's (http://www.manic-pop-thrills.com/temp/hfl2big1.jpg)a picture of it running at 1920x1200 with anisotropic filtering but no AA, and all detail maxed out. On an Athlon 4000 with a GeForce Ultra, I played through it the whole way like this, with only occasional framerate hiccups.

er,,

thanks?

[Hump]

Using my Radeon 9800 np I got consistent performance during my first run through the game. Friday I picked up a Geforce 6800 128 that was on sale and installed that. I took a second run through the game and got some NASTY slowdowns, particularly where particle and glow effects were used on a large scale ie; the room in which dr. Mossman escapes on the teleport with Eli Vance. The room has a large glowing energy tube set into the floor . When I turned to face it my framerate went from 200's down to 10-20 fps. When the power got shut off the performance went back to normal.

Not sure if its the drivers or the card itself but it sucks.

[Winterrain]

@steve Actually, AA would´ve done loads to your game.

You don´t really put all that money into your gear and want to have a stairway on each vertical structure as in steves screenshot. Boy thats ugly.

[steve]

@steve Actually, AA would´ve done loads to your game.
Yeah, brought it to a crawl at 1920x1200, which is the native resolution of my monitor, and the only widescreen resolution supported on my setup. So option B is running at another resolution either stretched or centered.


You don´t really put all that money into your gear and want to have a stairway on each vertical structure as in steves screenshot. Boy thats ugly.
Yeah, jaggies are the worst! God, how did we put up with that, ever!

Jaggies have never bothered me. If given a choice between resolution or AA, I always go for resolution.

[Xaroc]

Yeah, jaggies are the worst! God, how did we put up with that, ever!

Jaggies have never bothered me. If given a choice between resolution or AA, I always go for resolution.

Those jaggies look like crap. 1280x960 with 4xAA looks better than that.

-- Xaroc

[steve]

Those jaggies look like crap. 1280x960 with 4xAA looks better than that.
Not on an LCD with a native resolution of 1920x1200.

1600x1200, centered, generally looks better than any scaled resolution (though you do get a bit of natural AA).

[Xaroc]

Those jaggies look like crap. 1280x960 with 4xAA looks better than that.
Not on an LCD with a native resolution of 1920x1200.

1600x1200, centered, generally looks better than any scaled resolution (though you do get a bit of natural AA).

Well for those of us without LCDs we just get to see it like this (http://www.xaroc.com/hl2.jpg). That is 1280x960 with 4xAA. Note how much better all the wires and the bridge up top look.

-- Xaroc