Let me take a crack at guessing this mystery...

[FishEagle]

Ok, im just going on record saying, people like me with the Intel Chipsets and stuff, witch cannot afford to get new computers and upgrade there graphics systems will never get to play Half Life 2: Episode 3, due to the solid fact the graphics that E3 is made with will be that of Portal 2's making it next to impossible for the people who have the entire collection of Half Life games Dating from the original Half Life to complete their collection once more with the Rather distant Half Life 2: Episode 3. I do believe it should be the same graphics system as the other Half Life 2 Games so everyone can have and enjoy Half Life 2, not just the rich people with high end computers, some of us cannot afford 500 Bucks to upgrade our systems and buy new computers.

 

[Mr Stabby]

Communist.

 

[Damic]

Wtf; every game of Valve can be played on not high end pc's, if you want to play in HD (1900x1080) and everything maxed out, you need a good pc.

My pc is turning 4 years old (Q9550) the only thing I've upgraded and that was because the original part had a failure is my graphics card, I had a 4870 and it failed 2 times and the second time it was replace with a 5770 and that is still my card. My screen game size 1400x960 (windowed mode)

 

[Hectic Glenn]

Thought these quotes from Gabe and Kutta may help from the recent interview - http://www.podcast17.com/interviews/audio/gabe-newell/

GLENN @ 37:26: You said there for a second there that you are interested in the hardware side of things, and obviously you have the Steam Hardware survey. What kind of information have you got back from that over the years, and what’s really surprised you about it I guess.


GABE @ 37:41: I don't think there are a lot of surprises, I think it gives us a lot of confidence in the rate of change. I think that people always underestimate how much faster PCs are getting. If you look into the future, if you look 5 years down the road, just the sheer amount of integer, floating points, shader performance we’re gonna have, it’s just gonna be staggering. You have to plan accordingly, you can’t just go “Whoa, look how fast everything’s got, let’s go make a bunch of changes to take advantage of that”. So staying aware of that is interesting.

It was a little bit interesting watching the adoption curve of Windows 7 versus Vista in the gaming community. How much faster Windows 7 was adopted than Vista was. Because to me it felt like a really accurate decision by the gaming community as to what a good decision was. It was completely separate from what the press has been saying. But if you asked me, “could you use the rate with which people convert to actually generate a very useful score?”, you know a review score, it seems like the gaming community is much more accurate in their scoring than most of the traditional PC reviewing magazines. I just think it’s great to have the data and to have it out there where everybody can see it.

KUTTA @ 39:32: For us it serves as a really practical goal. For Portal 2 when we were trying to figure out things like the minimum specifications for PC and Mac, for our customers, being able to go to this authoritative piece of data that tells us exactly what our customers have is invaluable. It lets us spend our effort making the game look really good and play well on the most number of customers’ machines. And for us, without that it would have been a lot of guess work----


GABE @ 39:56: And a lot of arguing.


WILLIAM @ 40:00: And any comments Kutta on DirectX 11?


KUTTA @ 40:04: I think DirectX 11 is kind of the next logical step from DirectX 10. I actually worked on DirectX 10 when I was at Microsoft. We did the API redesign from DX9 to DX10, we got a much cleaner API out of it, but it always takes a version to work the kinks out. And I think that DX11 is a lot better system for that. Obviously one issue right now is that we wanna deliver really high quality games to our existing customers, and given rates of adoption of operating systems and video cards and things like that, making a game that’s exclusively DX11 would probably be a mistake, but making a game that supports DX11 becomes more and more interesting. As the software and hardware survey show, I think it’s getting to the point where we can expect DX11 to be more standard in the next couple of years.


The rate of adoption of new graphics features after DX9 seems to have slowed in general. DX9 as an API is really pretty well done and if you look at other platforms, OpenGL yes, in OpenGL kind of, they all kind of converged on a feature set that’s mostly in DX9. So that’s obviously shaped some of our decisions in graphics technology as to what to support as the main line.

 

[Sam Raven]

I remember when the ATI x800 was like something that I wanted but was too expensive for me to upgrade. Now it feels like a thousand centuries ago.

 

[tabernumse]

Communist.

Yeah, a socialist commie who hates America..


No, but seriously.. I agree with you some of the way.. I think they should make a new engine..
but I am confident that Valve will make sure to make an engine that will look good, at the same time as running great..

 

[sixteenth]

I remember when the ATI x800 was like something that I wanted but was too expensive for me to upgrade. Now it feels like a thousand centuries ago.

Felt that way with the 9800 Pro (256mb's!).

 

[Sam Raven]

What I would like to see is a drive towards having more powerful graphics cards but reducing their power consumption. What I see now is the very high end graphics cards drawing as much power as a toaster oven, or any appliance with a heating element for that matter.

 

[Katamariguy]

What are you talking about? I'm pretty sure Portal 2 would work fine on low settings.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Ok, im just going on record saying, people like me with the Intel Chipsets and stuff,

Which chipset?