How to make Half Life 2 perform with cheap kit
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19405
Hardware the upgrades you need
By Arron Rouse: Tuesday 02 November 2004, 07:43
THE BIGGEST gaming event of the year is only two weeks away and many people are fretting. Half-Life 2 promises to be as good as the original, at least if the many early reviews are to be trusted, and just about everyone wants to play it. But what if you're stuck with old hardware and not a lot of money?
A few months ago Valve made Counter Strike: Source available. It uses the Half-Life 2 engine, Source, and it looks fabulous. More importantly for people waiting to play Half-Life 2, it includes something called the Video Stress Test. It's designed to give you an idea of how well the game will perform on your system. Go to any hardware site and you can find out exactly how well an Athlon 64 FX or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will play the game. What they don't tell you is how well your existing system will fare.
The question is what to do if you're stuck with an old 2GHz Pentium 4 or an Athlon 1800+ with a GeForce MX in it. You want to play the game at its best but can't afford a new system for just one game. So, after a week of scrounging old bits of kit, getting hold of the Half-Life 2 Video Stress Test and ripping machines apart, the INQ has the answers that you need.
Specifications
The first interesting bit of news came from Valve itself quite a while ago. The minimum system that you need is as follows:
1.2GHz Processor
256MB RAM
DirectX 7 graphics card
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
It seems an unbelievably low level of requirements so it was put to the test. No processor type specified? Celeron it is then. That might seem an almost evil choice but it seemed only fair at the time. The recommended specs appear much more likely:
2.4 GHz Processor
512MB RAM
DirectX 9 level graphics card
Windows 2000/XP
Testing, Testing
So, with one beaten up old Celeron 1.2GHz ready to roll, it was given a slight edge in the form of 512MB of PC100 RAM. That's about the cheapest upgrade there is. On the graphics front, more evil was perpetrated. The machine had come with a GeForce 4 MX420. You don't get much more DirectX 7 than that so it stayed in the machine for the first round. It was followed by a GeForce 4 Ti4200 and then an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. All of the settings were the program's recommended ones for the card except with the 9800 where switching on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering made no difference to the performance. Just for good measure, an old Athlon 1800+ machine was dug out too. The results were surprising:
Have to read the rest there . :p
