Doomtrooper
Veteran
Luminescent said:
Yep had to take it offline, the bandwidth was insane..had 50 people logged in steady for 4 hours
I'll put it back up for a bit..let me know if you get it
Half life 2 Article from Max PC
- Thread starter Doomtrooper
- Start date
Yep had to take it offline, the bandwidth was insane..had 50 people logged in steady for 4 hours
I'll put it back up for a bit..let me know if you get it
DemoCoder said:
Did you read the article? They listed all FX boards as top-rung for the game, feature set-wise, which is laughable. The only ATI boards listed were the 9500-9800s, with no 9000/9200s mentioned due to the lack of DX9 support. And Valve isn't asserting that it's "targeted at DX6 cards; they're asserting that it's scalable enough in its supported features to run on such a board. Since when has any OEM-level board been able to keep up with the latest gaming software? How many owners of P4 2Ghz+ equivalent machines will run out and buy a -$100 video card (probably too many)?
And I did write if they bought such a board for HL2.
If you're still in need of a mirror, I guess I can give you guys mine as well. Please, no linkage outside of this thread though.
Grab them from here.
Grab them from here.
For those of you stateside, you can have a look here.
Thanks brit.
hmm, looks like the day where i finally go from an integrated graphics solution to an actual graphics card will come soon enough. Ill stay wait until the next gen cards come out, maybe a good deal could be had then.
later,
hmm, looks like the day where i finally go from an integrated graphics solution to an actual graphics card will come soon enough. Ill stay wait until the next gen cards come out, maybe a good deal could be had then.
later,
Testiculus Giganticus
Newcomer
If they use parhelia style DM, they limit it only to parhelia.No chips support it, and next gen will do it through vs/ps 3.0-my guess is that they use presampled DM.
Testiculus Giganticus said:
They could do more than one DM path surely? I mean it seems that they are coding specifically for other effects depending on you hardware... but then again the Parhelia doesn't have quite the same installed base as the other nV/ATi chips... we shall just have to wait and see I guess.
Kyro == dx6
I should run quite nicly using the dx6 codepath. And since the kyroII is quite faster than the TNT2, it should be nice and playable. Just not very pretty.
Its a pity the board doesn't support cubemaps, otherwise the Kyro could pretend to be a DX7 part. Ah well...
(refering to the card table in the magazine article)
I should run quite nicly using the dx6 codepath. And since the kyroII is quite faster than the TNT2, it should be nice and playable. Just not very pretty.
Its a pity the board doesn't support cubemaps, otherwise the Kyro could pretend to be a DX7 part. Ah well...
(refering to the card table in the magazine article)
I understand your concerns, but technically and in the sense of the table it is a completely correct place for even the FX5200. That table obviously isn't intended to be a performance indicator for the game, but primarily a sorting of technology levels according to the card's DX generation (and they made that perfectly clear in the article IMO)! What do you expect? The 9000 and 9200 are just DX8 level cards, so of course they get listed in the DX8 cathegory (which as they point out BTW, are gonna be perfectly capable of dispaying almost all but the most fancy effects and are gonna be a good platform for the game), nobody but ATi can be blamed that those are not low-end DX9 boards instead. So what if even the slowest FX boards all get listed in the DX9 list, they are DX9 boards after all, despite their meager performance. The 5200 might be too slow to play the game with all effects enabled, but a) is that not the point of the table, b) they mention that possibility in the paragraph that goes with it and c) as Democoder (and the article too actually) put it, we actually don't know how performance of the low end DX9 boards is gonna be in a DX9 game yet, so why not wait till the game is actually here and testable before we pass judgement?John Reynolds said:
Luminescent
Veteran
The article display displacement mapping as an option for DX8 and DX9 cards, including the 9700, FX, NV2x series, and 8500. The inclusion of all these leads me to believe that valve may have implemented something like this or some sort of render-to-vertex array implementation rather than tayloring the mapping to specialized hardware (i.e. Parhelia).
Does anyone know if HL2 will have multimonitor support. Id love to see this feature in this game.
later,
later,
John Reynolds said:
you obviously didnt John.
The table was by DX class NOT performance class. The article actually states;
'whilst there are Direct X 9 compliant cards that start at around $120, our guess is that their slow clock speeds and narrow memory pipelines won't be able to keep up with Half-Life 2's demanding requirements'
what else can they do, list what cards can do, then cop out on performance as no one knows but clearly state cheap DX9 cards wont be up to it - without specifically naming them by chipset.
Seems fair and correct to me.
John Reynolds said:
Valve games have never required cutting edge. Half Life1 ran just fine on not only the Voodoo1, but on software rendering as well.
The HL2 engine looks great, but it mostly looks like lots of hi-res textures, geometry, great AI, and physics. It does not use unified lighting, and the shader effects are not DX9, but look like regular DX6 fixed function multitexture class effects, thus, it may run ok at low resolution on any system with a fast CPU, since the geometry, physics, and AI will be CPU dependent, and the shader effects will probably run on DX6, and the hi-res textures can always be scaled down to deal with vid-mem problems.
2Ghz machines are value machines today, under $399, so I see lots of reasons to target this class of machines. Vast majority of these machines either ship with integrated video, or MX class performance.
I mean, for crying out loud, the MX440 runs UT2003 at maximum detail on 800x600 at 100+fps, and 1024x768 @70+fps. I could certainly see HL2 running at 60fps at 640x480 on a low end card plus value CPU.
I agree with your general notion about HalfLife (both 1 and 2) and there playability on old hardware, but the MX440, whilst low end feature-wise by today's standards, is quite a performer when it comes to actual games (granted without any AA or AF).Democoder said:
The real dogs are IMO all the various 64bit DDR or 128bit SDR based cards which were and are quite popular OEM cards.
sorry for all of you who wasted time with the non-working torrents.
okay i managed to get it working and all the files are available through a single torrent link, here it is:
http://olivaw.no-ip.org/torrents/hl2.torrent
you have to download and install bittorrent first
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html
as i have little bandwidth available please let your bittorrent clients open so load will be shared between us (the principle of file sharing).
okay i managed to get it working and all the files are available through a single torrent link, here it is:
http://olivaw.no-ip.org/torrents/hl2.torrent
you have to download and install bittorrent first
http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/download.html
as i have little bandwidth available please let your bittorrent clients open so load will be shared between us (the principle of file sharing).
I've worked with MX440s. They most certainly can not run UT2003 at max detail at 8x6 and pull 100fps. More like 20-30 MAYBE. I had my buddy drop his down to 16-bit to get some more frames.Even my "lowly" 8500 stomps all over a MX440, and for the same or less money these days.
GF4MXs have no redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned, unless you just want a nice 2D card or a card for The Sims. Even C&C Generals runs like crap on there, so it's pretty useless for non-FPS games as well. And with NVIDIA's history of blurry 2D (tho I hear the GF4s may be OK) they may not qualify for that either.
GF4MXs have no redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned, unless you just want a nice 2D card or a card for The Sims. Even C&C Generals runs like crap on there, so it's pretty useless for non-FPS games as well. And with NVIDIA's history of blurry 2D (tho I hear the GF4s may be OK) they may not qualify for that either.
