HL2 screens?

[WolkFox]

I think it can look so much better but... is this screen a decent quality?

 

[Acepilotf14]

Make it a lil bigger and it would be okay.

 

[Jintor]

Are you talking about your ingame graphics quality being good, or as a wallpaper, or what?

 

[WolkFox]

Those are my in-game graphics, forgot to specify ^^;

 

[giant384]

the quality of the graphics is your own personal opinion.

 

[WolkFox]

Can it REALLY look like this?

 

[Jintor]

Whoever shot that photo is a really bad photographer.

 

[liPillON]

Can it REALLY look like this?

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/article/566/566202/half-life-2-20041115111154303.jpg

yes



those are taken on my old gpu (9600xt) with all maxed up - running at 7/8 fps, of course

 

[WolkFox]

lol, that's a crappy FPS. I was afraid you could play with a decent FPS 'cuz no new computer until next year ;;

 

[wrathofgod]

while we're on the subject of quailty, any special console/config settings that you guys/girls use that you feel really makes a difference in in-game quality?

I'm always for looking for that little extra something.

 

[kupocake]

lol, that's a crappy FPS. I was afraid you could play with a decent FPS 'cuz no new computer until next year ;;

BellaLI was playing with 7/8 fps on a machine that is now 3 years old. You CAN quite easily run the game with graphics that good now. My Radeon 9800 Pro (also 3 years old) runs the game with slightly worse settings at a playable framerate.

 

[Solver]

Yep, it's gorgeous at high settings. That said, I don't think I've seen another modern game that scales so well on different hardware and that still looks so good in medium. Well, Doom3 is also great on medium, though antialiasing really helps it.

Scaling, scaling is great. HL2 runs comfortably on a CPU around 1.5 GHz with a GeForce 4, MX or Ti. Doesn't look anywhere near as good as on high settings, of course, but runs great. Good engine.

 

[chilledsanity]

Well one thing you can do to help the graphics quality that doesn't seem to have been done in these screenshots is to use Anti-aliasing on the alpha textures. Notice on those large shots how smooth the AA looks on the sides of buildings, yet the leaves on the tress still look all nasty and blocky? That's because the card is using Multisample Anti-Aliasing, which is great for 3D objects, but doesn't do anything for textures.

Super-sampling is required to do textures, both Nvidia and ATI now have a method of using MSAA for all the 3D objects (which is faster and looks better), and SSAA for the textures with alpha channels (transparencies). ATI calls theirs Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, and can be enabled in their drivers using every card from the 9000 series on up. Nvidia's is called Transparency SuperSampling, but it's pretty much the same thing. Unfortunately, their method requires newer hardware, I think only the 7200 on up do it.

Here are some really old samples I took a long time ago using 3rd party hacks, before ATI incorporated it into their drivers. It shows the difference in the methods. The techniques used now look better than either of these:

 

[Ridge]

yes
those are taken on my old gpu (9600xt) with all maxed up - running at 7/8 fps, of course

I can honestly say Ive never looked back at the train station during Point Insertion!!!

 

[liPillON]

lol, that's a crappy FPS. I was afraid you could play with a decent FPS 'cuz no new computer until next year ;;

BellaLI was playing with 7/8 fps on a machine that is now 3 years old. You CAN quite easily run the game with graphics that good now.

yeah as kupoartist says, 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF was waaay too much for that little poor graphic card (i bought it before hl2 came out, and it was already a mid-range card in spring 2004).. those screenshots was taken at that level of detail because i was going to use them as wallpapers
my first run through the game was at 1024x768, no AA, 4xAF at an average framerate of 30/40 fps. the second, at 800x600 4xAA, 8xAF, was pretty playable too

I can honestly say Ive never looked back at the train station during Point Insertion!!!

and now? do you like what you see?

 

[Jintor]

I don't even know my card anymore. It's so... busted.