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Re: levels of AA: HL2 was shown at ATi's booth. The maximum level of anti-aliasing supported in hardware on ATi cards is 6x. This causes severe performance loss. ATi's 2x AA is viable in most environments for a very small performance hit, and really does clean up jaggies pretty well. 8x...

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/e3_2003_half-life2/ Sorry if I missed this already being posted... It engages HL2 within the industry, rather than offering up the same stuff that is in all the other previews.

Yes, Ridic - that's right: PC3200 is clocked faster than PC2700. How to pick your RAM depends a lot on your system and your requirements. I'm going to assume you're going to run that Athlon XP 2400+ at stock speed, but want to be able to tweak everything you can out of it in BIOS. What...

What I said was that Athlon XP CPUs don't actually run better under the Windows XP OS, but that you'll see other benefits that will give you a performance boost....

Athlons themselves - not really. However, XP / Win2k can address more memory, can use a slightly more efficient file structure, and can manage system resources better than Win98. However, a lot of device drivers are optimized for XP / Win2k.

Hey- Don't just upgrade your RAM for the hell of it. Athlons are pretty much limited to using bandwidth as defined by their FSB, so Athlons on a 266 FSB aren't really going to use the improved bandwidth of 333 MHz memory. PC2100 will give an Athlon on a 266 MHz FSB the 2.1 GB/s memory...

The GeForce 2 MX card will probably not give you the fillrate for a playable game at moderate settings. It certainly lacks the technology to give you the eye candy. There are a number of good midrange cards out there now, but how they'll perform in HL2 is anyone's guess. I'll take a stab at...

Ridic doubtless knows that a simple BIOS toggle will disable the onboard sound... which you will probably want to do, as nForce2 boards of all makes have been plagued by onboard sound troubles. The Asus is a great board, the standard of the class. It'll cost a few more dollars, but - you...

Someone is trying not to admit he's still running Socket 7... the last architecture that worked with both AMD and Intel chips.

Erm... a few random thoughts after reading this thread. Frontside buses are still measured (usually) in MHz, not GHz (except the 875 / 865 family of chipsets). Older AMD processors ran on a 200 / 266 MHz FSB (well, 100 or 133 double-pumped, but let's not split that hair now...). Newer AMD...

Valve says the minimum CPU required is a 700 MHz P3-class chip. Now, I loved my 486 DX4/100 as much as anyone, but it had 60ns RAM (at best) on a 33MHz clock, PCI graphics, and so on. It appears to me that above we have a study in Moore's Law, not a miraculous parity in processing power.

Furby - you're right about E3. I posted (somewhere in this topic) a quote from a previewer who had the game demoed for them on a 2.0GHz P4 with a GF4 (probably a Ti4600...) and they said it was smooth with a rich set of effects enabled... If you're really curious, you can look for my...

Hey! A solution! Well done and thanks...

Deus Ex is drawn from the old theatrical / later literary device, "Deus Ex Machina" - literally, "god from the machine". Ion Storm probably intended this literal meaning - that's a no-brainer, considering the content of the game. However, this term is used to describe a forced resolution...

Munro - A "Donate via PayPal" button might help... ?

From Gamespy's preview: "With all of these considerable graphical upgrades, we were pleased to hear that the minimum system specs are currently targeted at a 700 MHz PC with 128 MB RAM and a DX6-level video card, meaning you won't need a NASA supercomputer to run Half-Life 2." From...

The game is supposed to be able to run on very low specs, well below what you have - so yes, it probably will run. Keep in mind, as I've said elsewhere, that we're basing this on what few tidbits are floating around in the public domain on system requirements for HL2, and comments from the...

GF4 MX is GeForce2 level technology. You're going to have two limitations, in terms of straight image quality, with that card: 1) It incorporates only the older DX7 fixed transform / clipping / lighting capabilities, so advanced pixel and vertex shading effects will have to be...

Apos- For the amount of money a decent new power supply costs, just replace it... Alternatively, you could get the model number and see if the manufacturer has a tech sheet.

1) New CPU / Graphics cards have very different power requirements than old ones. For example, while you might have a 350W power supply in your P2 or P3 box, it might supply most of the juice on the 5V rail (for example). With a P4, you want it on the 12V rail... even new supplies that aren't...