The article says it’s a 2002 laptop and says it would have been “significantly out of date” when Half-Life 2 launched. Half-Life 2 launched in 2004. So that’s 2 years. He’s also reduced the resolution to 512x512 - less than half the original resolution - and hasn’t recreated several of the lighting effects.
I don’t know what unoptimised games this is supposed to be a middle finger to specifically, but it strikes me that it wouldn’t be considered particularly out of the ordinary to find a modern game that could run on a 2023 machine at less than half resolution and with significantly reduced lighting effects.
TBF, at the time, 800x600 was a pretty standard resolution. For gaming on a low-end PC, you might go down to 640x480 to get a better framerate, which wouldn’t look too bad on a CRT.
Sure, I’m just arguing against the framing of this as “he got this super-graphics-intense programme to run on a PC which would have been considered a relic at the time”, when actually he ran significantly downgraded graphics on a PC which would have been 2 years old at the time.
Very cool, but hopefully nobody actually thinks this proves anything on the game optimization debate, right? It’s not like Half Life 2 is the graphical standard most gamers expect nowadays. But if you are content with this graphics, I assure you even recent releases that look like that will perform great, so…
I built my wife a gaming PC a year ago with a Radeon RX 7800 XT, and fucking Disney Dreamlight Valley will have the fans going at 50%.
Dream light looks great though. Just because it’s casual doesn’t mean it’s not GPU intensive.
Does it? Models are meh, lighting is baked in, view distance is limited in scope.
The framerate was probably unlimited. It’ll use all the power possible to render more frames than it needs if you let it. It needs v-sync or a framerate limit I’d guess. If you let it render 1000+ frames per second it will, despite almost none of them being displayed.
I limit the frame rate every chance I get. VRR reduces the need to worry about low framerate. Gaming more efficiently and without tearing! It’s a win win!
Your average/typical Gamer doesn’t know what to expect.
Half Life 2 was released over 20 years ago. It was meant to run on what is now regarded as ancient hardware.
When Half Life 2 released there was actually a whole lot of grumbling from gamers as the system requirements were very high. It ran like shit or didn’t ran at all unless you had very recent and high end hardware.
I remember buying a new gpu back then specifically because of HL2. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I bought an Asus 6800 card, which wasn’t powerful enough to run HL2. However with a bit of luck those could be modded and overclocked into an 6800 Ultra which was powerful enough. However it was a lottery whether this was possible and ran without issues. The first card I bought couldn’t do it, so I went to the shop and returned it. Went to another shop and bought one there, which also didn’t work. Then I went over to another town and bought one there which finally worked out. Even though it was a mid-tier card, gpus were expensive back then so it cost me all of the money I’d saved up for a couple of years before.
HL2 has gotten a lot of optimizations as the years went on, but when it first released it was an example of an unoptimized game when released. And just like these days people were bitching about it.
To be fair to HL2: just like the first game, it was very technologically advanced for the time and the focus was clearly on making something novel and groundbreaking. Poor performance on release is still a legitimate criticism, but there are far worse offenders out there that don’t have the excuse of pushing the technical boundaries of a medium.
Absolutely, they pushed the limits on what was possible and used everything they had to make something really unique. They also wrote the book on level design with the Half Life series. If people haven’t seen it already I would recommend this YouTube docu about Black Mesa which goes into detail about the level design aspect: https://youtu.be/G_TcAxAKCAI
One of the things Valve also did really well was to have a quick and easy update system. This allowed them to push updates out to users quickly and fix a lot of bugs and optimise the game. This is taken for granted these days and even hated as devs push out unfinished unoptimised games with the promise to fix it. But back then this was a new thing and a lot of people were very happy about it.
gpus were expensive back then
Wait till you hear about the current GPU prices…
What I recall was HL2 being a lot easier on the resources compares to Doom 3, which it was competing with. It sparked a community project called DOOM3 CAN DO IT TOO, where they tried to show open areas and water physics. Doom3 itself, being on Mars and using narrow corridors got the reputation that it rendered narrow scenes and got away with being badly optimized. Later, Quake Wars definitely proved the engine was capable of large open spaces (sporting Carmack’s Megatexture technology).
It’s just the law of diminishing returns at play: with each successive improvement in graphics technology, the number of players who’d rather turn the graphics settings down than buy new hardware increases .
From what I remember while HL2 was demanding it was relatively well optimized at release. That being said, I would have been fine with 30-40 FPS back then.
So, Black Mesa?
I understood that at first too, but instead of HL1 in HL2 it’s the opposite. It’s showing (something like) HL2 in HL1.
I recall the physics being the big deal with HL2. Graphics were also great for the time.
Well, there are some ‘poorly optimised’ games out there. Am able to run eg. Cyberpunk 2077 near maximum (non-raytraced) settings and it happily trundles along at 80+ fps. Would really like to play Mind Over Magic, just my kind of game and which looks like it was done on the Quake3 engine, and I’m struggling since it runs like absolute ass regardless of what the settings are. Think that’s the joy of Unity, though.
I think a lot of the problem is that we’re long past the point where diminishing returns kick in. Doubling the amount of processing required for a few percent more lighting fidelity, that kind of thing. Half Life 2 was expensive for its day, mostly due to its extended development - about $40m then, equivalent of ~$70m now - but it still looks great, mostly due to its strong art style. (I realise Valve keep sneakily updating the engine, so things like the water effects are much better now than they were on release.) There’s games that cost ten times as much and which don’t really look a lot better, but which will get tagged as ‘badly optimised’ since they’re chasing the very latest graphical shinies.
I think the sheer price of producing all of those HD assets is a significant risk to any studio, and means that we end up with a lot of cookie-cutter AAA games where the industry is very cautious about taking chances of any kind. Maybe I’m not the main target for the shiniest of graphics, but my Steam games with the most hours - Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, the Dark Souls series, Crusader Kings - run the gamut from ‘charmingly simple’ to ‘functionally realistic’, but I’d not describe any of them as great because of their graphics.
Btw, that the isometric game Above Snakes runs worse than any hobby Unity game from itch, is this a wine (linux) thing or is the game just shit?
Rose tinted glasses.
