Game won't run on this hardware, although it is supposed to...

[All_Steamed_Out]

I don't know if anyone has an idea here.

My nephew got a copy of Halflife2 for Christmas, and although their family has a low end machine (a new Dell), both the retail box and the Intel site says it should run. Intel has a game guide which gives Halflife2 a yellow rating - that it will sometimes crash when loading a new level - but that it will run (with this graphics chipset)

I have only listened to my nephew over the phone - this is what he was able to tell me
- He is able to complete the installation - and can run Counterstrike Source (not great, but acceptably).
- At the end of the installation, he gets the error message that he meets the CPU requirement (a Celeron 2.4, I believe), the memory requirements (256mg), but not the graphics requirements (he is using the Intel Extreme 828 65G chipset. this motherboard has neither an open AGP or PCI-E slot).
- I had him run dixdiag and he has DirectX 9.0c installed and no errors showing.

I have a couple of ideas:
- The machine was new at the end of October, and I noticed today that Intel released a driver for this chipset on Nov 9th. That may help, but I am suspicious it will not do the trick.
- The fact that the video shares memory with the system memory , may put him short by that amount (32 or 64mg?), but shouldn't he get an error message over memory in that case - rather than the video card?

Does anybody out there have any suggestions......

 

[Link]

AFAIK, HL2 dosen't check your GFX card memory, it checks your gfx card chipset, drivers and directx version (I stand to be corrected), so your problem probably isnt shared memory.

Updating the driver might help, although I doubt it.

What do you mean by an "open" AGP?

Good luck getting this sorted anyway.

 

[Freyar]

Moral of the story: Do not purhcase pre-built computers.

 

[Miker75]

I would also check to make sure that he is dedicating enough memory to the video card. If he's only running with 8 or 16MB that may not be enough for HL2 (I'm not sure what the minimum amount is these days that the integrated video on Intel chipsets will take). If he's running with 32 or 64MB that may be taking too much memory away from system memory for HL2 to run.

My advice:

- Buy an extra 256MB module, they don't cost much these days (probably less than HL2 did), OR
- Buy a PCI video card. You can still get NVidia PCI video cards that aren't too bad (and certainly better than the onboard rubbish from Intel).