Another masterpiece by Fallouts Mr. Chimp (HARDWARE HL2 GUIDE)

:naughty: I'm ready for Half Life 2 bring it on!
 
D'oh! I have to get me a keyboard! I am ready, except for the video card. It is a Direct X 8.1. :D
 
Not that I'd want to take anything away from Mr Chimp - it's an absolutely fantastic guide and all power to him - but Valve have said that over something like 2GHz, the performance increase will be negligable and that's when the graphics card really comes into play in terms of raising the spangliness levels. It was in the last PC Zone preview, although I don't have it to hand.
I just thought that was worth noting, seeing as he makes it sound a bit more desperate than that.
 
One gripe.... he states that the FX series won't run it very well, and basically suggests a 9600 type card over a 5900/5950 card. When in fact the 5900/5950s will be closer to the 9700/9800s. :flame:

Just a gripe of mine.
 
lol, good luck to anyone expecting to run this decently with the min specs. Black box specs are huge bs, even with the best LOD and low texture render systems available.
 
By the way..

Is a geforce FX5600 considered being one of the "old" FX cards?
 
CrazyHarij said:
By the way..

Is a geforce FX5600 considered being one of the "old" FX cards?
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"Old" in meaning "sucks"? I dont really think so, anyway Valve said there is gonna be a mixed-mode only for nvidia cards, in some maps the game will automatically switch to DX 8.1 as nvidia cards tend to run better on it instead of DX9. But dont worry, DX 8.1 can already let you see most of the good stuff ;)
 
Dx 8.1 is fine for pretty much everything...
 
Okay, yeah DX 8.1 isn't really that bad. I might get a better graphics card later on though. :)
 
CrazyHarij said:
Okay, yeah DX 8.1 isn't really that bad. I might get a better graphics card later on though. :)
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Just stay from Nvidiot and you'll be fine :p
 
Great! Half Life 2 should run ok on my PC. Only got a DX 8.1 card though, but itll still run fine/
 
Thankyou so much Mr. Chimp! This really helped me! :D
 
Nice article. There are some errors in it however, see it as constructive criticism :)

Likewise, if you have an integrated solution then you need to buy something new.
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Not 100% true, ATI for example has onboard graphics cards who fully support DX8 hardware acceleration and will run HL2 fine.

Secondly, if it's in the GeForce FX 5xxx series, it's really not going to perform as well in HL2 as an “equivalent” ATI card.
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In DX9, you're right, in DX8 it's not true. I'm pretty sure a 5950 can easily outrun a 9800 Pro in DX8 mode. Nvidia cards don't have their weaknesses in DX8 without PS2.0.
 
I'd sure like to see a side by side screenshot of DX8 and DX9 running the half-life 2 rig.

Around last years relase there was a huge hyping of DX9 being so much more than DX8 now the general concensus seems to be DX8 will be fine, DX9 will be better.

I'd like to know what is fine, and what is better :)

working on the assumptions that all they show is the best at current time it leads me to wonder what so-so looks like.

What I guess I'm saying is I'm not interested in what HL2 will look like on an uber rig I'm interested in what HL2 will look like on my rig.
 
But, but I thought MrChimp was ours. OURS!! ;)



Thanks for the nice read there MrChimp. Appreciated. :)
 
Raxxman said:
I'd like to know what is fine, and what is better :)
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Theres alot of screenshots around showing comparisons, im sure somone will post them.


From what i gather in that DX9 demo movie, stuff like shiney alien skin and sunlight reflection on shiney tiles will be missing in non-directx9 cards.
 
I´m sure going from 512 to 1gig of ram will greatly improve the fluidnes of the game as we have seen in Far Cry and ut2004. Othervise the guide was good, but speculations as the game haven´t been release yet.
 
I just need to upgrade my ti4200 to a newer radeon and then ill be set...
 
Paintballer said:
One gripe.... he states that the FX series won't run it very well, and basically suggests a 9600 type card over a 5900/5950 card. When in fact the 5900/5950s will be closer to the 9700/9800s. :flame:

Just a gripe of mine.
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He is probably using this and this as a reference.
btw HP means Half Precision and FP means full. ATI's run at FP.
 
AMD ATHLON XP 3000+ 2.25GHz is that better than a 2.4ghz prosessor?
 
An athlon 3000+ is probably better in some bench marks than a intel 2.4. Nowdays its not all about the Mhz anymore.
 
would a athalon AMD ATHLON XP 3000+ 2.25GHz be more than enough for hl2?
 
sHm0zY said:
AMD ATHLON XP 3000+ 2.25GHz is that better than a 2.4ghz prosessor?
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Better than a Pentium 4 2.4, yes...


deevee said:
An athlon 3000+ is probably better in some bench marks than a intel 2.4. Nowdays its not all about the Mhz anymore.
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Yep, my processor is a 1.7 GHz with a core speed of ~600 MHz I think, yet has the performance of a P4 3.0 Ghz... freaky!
 
Asus said:
He is probably using this and this as a reference.
btw HP means Half Precision and FP means full. ATI's run at FP.
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Yes that and months of intelligence gathering on the FX's dire performance with pixel shaders. It suffers in SM1.1 (DX8) never mind SM2.x (DX9) with floating point percision. The 9600 beats the 5900 for gods sake...

With half percision the 5900 runs ok but the question is does image quality suffer? Just look at the image quality of Far Cry on the FX.

Anyway I'm glad people liked my article :cheers:
 
mrchimp said:
Yes that and months of intelligence gathering on the FX's dire performance with pixel shaders. It suffers in SM1.1 (DX8) never mind SM2.x (DX9) with floating point percision. The 9600 beats the 5900 for gods sake...

With half percision the 5900 runs ok but the question is does image quality suffer? Just look at the image quality of Far Cry on the FX.

Anyway I'm glad people liked my article :cheers:
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Yeah, it rocked house :E
 
2.53 pent4
Geforce4 Ti 4600 128
512 sd ddr

Planing on getting Geforce 6800 ultra soon.
 
mrchimp that was pretty good advice u gave in ur article :)
not being so informed on hardware like many others this was a good read :)
thanks :thumbs:
 
marksmanHL2 :) said:
How much in depth research did you actually do?! :O


Nice one anyway... :)
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I lurk in the beyond3d forums, there by far the best place to find this sort of stuff out. There are quite alot of developers that post there.

I also visit a range of hardware sites the best one being EliteBastards.com.

As for the Source article I spent alot of time scouring the internet for information on the features mentioned in the Source licensing document. I also read most of the information from Valve thread. The rest of it I already knew.
 
"then HL2 should run pretty well and with some of the shader effects." One question... what are the shader effects??
 
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