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Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
- Angostura 5y agoThat's odd - I'm sure I remember completing that survey - and I was playing on Mac, but there are no Mac stats.
- filmor 5y agoSteam for Mac (and HL2 for Mac as well) only came out in 2010. In 2004, you're also still very much in the PowerPC era, so you wouldn't have been able to play the game on a Mac without some serious emulation effort.
- Angostura 5y agoThanks. I must have misremembered when I completed the survey
- agent13 5y agoAmusing to see only 6 people having a quad core CPU.
- actionfromafar 5y agoThose were most likely people with a motherboard with 4 CPU slots and with 4 CPUs plonked in there.
- phire 5y agoI was going to suggest it could be dual-socket, with HyperThreading enabled, but looks like the survey is HyperThreading aware and only counts real cores. So must be Quad Socket motherboards.
- Ekaros 5y agoI don't think there was even any dual dual-core solutions for x86 available in 2004... So must have been some quad socket weirdness...
- cheschire 5y agoI’m guessing it was game server software running on rack mounted servers.
- Daneel_ 5y agoUnless I'm misremembering, the first dual-core CPU on the market was the Athlon 64 X2 in 2005, so I agree that these results are likely from servers running Steam. Edit: a quick bit of google tells me both Intel and AMD released dual core CPUs in May 2005, with Intel beating AMD by a few weeks, so there you go.
- Bancakes 5y agoThe pentium D hadn't come out yet in 2004. Which quad core CPU's are you thinking of?
- bawolff 5y agoAmazing how cpu clock speed seems not out of place at all, while the rest seems so out of date (like 56k modems)
- Bancakes 5y agoInteresting, let's take a look at the instructions per clock. Oh, yikes. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-380GHz-vs-Intel-Pentium-Gold-G7400/m11003vsm1755065 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-380GHz...
- actionfromafar 5y ago36% better memory latency. Four times the single core performance. Two decades.
- mhh__ 5y agoAren't you comparing a fairly high end processor at the time (I wasn't alive when the pentium 4 came out, I think) with the bargain bin one from today? The new pentiums have the same microarchitecture but I don't know if they have all the execution units turned on + less cache.
- Ekaros 5y agoIt always comes to intersection of physical world and computers. After all electrons can only move so fast that is so far in single clock cycle... And I think more complex chips are internally "longer"... We could probably make some older generation chip now and run it much faster, but it is easier and more efficient to add lot more chip...
- PebblesHD 5y agoVery curious what the rest of the setups looked like for the 0.02% of people with a 1920 wide screen display back then…
- PebblesHD 5y agoGoogle tells me the Apple Cinema displays came out around this time as well, so surprised there aren’t more 2560 wide users.
- simonjgreen 5y agoApple and gaming did not coincide much at all then, and as I recall the cinema display couldn't be used with a PC without a weird adapter
- TestSIM1 5y agoValve added macOS support somewhere around 2009 if I recall correctly. I imagine a number of people with Apple Cinema display connected to their PC would be really limited.
- fps-hero 5y agoCRTs were all 4:3, and had better specifications than the LCDs of the time. Back then LCDs also followed PC standard 4:3 resolution. It wasn’t until LCD tech was cheap enough for mass production in TVs that 1080p monitors became the norm.
- phire 5y agoThe monitor would have been something like this HP L2335 LCD monitor from 2004 (this [1] review is from 2005). According to benchmarks [2], Half Life 2 was pretty vertex and/or cpu bound, so a mid-to-high range GPU ($300-$400) would be able to run at that resolution. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/1729/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/1729/2 [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/1546/ https://www.anandtech.com/show/1546/
- forlorn 5y agoGood old S3 ProSavage VGA, sweet memories...
- t-writescode 5y agoThese were the years of the GeForce 4 and the brand new amd64 processor. The Direct X version supported by GeForce 4 couldn’t even display the real pretty water textures at that time, or at least mine couldn’t on my GeForce 4 + amd64 laptop. Little guy was a beast back then. Compaq, I think? That game was so good and around that time, people were figuring out how to get HL2 to be multiplayer in story mode, and gmod was in its infancy right around then. Good times.
- samplatt 5y agoI recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it. Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise. And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
- gattilorenz 5y ago> came with Half-Life 2 I think mine came with Vietcong, which was... underwhelming.
- bayindirh 5y agoNope, I got a 9600XT, and it came with a serial number for HL2. I added a Zalman cooler on top of that card, and it was both silent and stable.
- gattilorenz 5y agoI guess it depends on who made the card? Probably Sapphire and MSI and others had different bundled stuff (maybe also different by country, and I'm in EU)
- poglet 5y agoI got the 9600XT for Half-Life 2 which was kinda silly in the end since HL2 took so long to come out that I could have gotten a newer card. However I believe it also came with a copy of Counter-Strike Source Beta which I enjoyed greatly. My card had tiny LED's on it that prevented me from sleeping with my computer on. Great times.
- unwind 5y agoVery cool, what a time machine! I wonder what the single person with a 9-pixel wide game screen was doing, and how they enjoyed their gaming experience. :)
- pewpew_ 5y agoNVidia Riva TNT2 Series! I spent the better part of a summer doing odd jobs to earn enough to purchase one from the local Electronic's Boutique. Great memories :)
- shifto 5y agoWas my first dual GPU setup! An AGP TNT2 and another PCI TNT2 for my third monitor.
- benob 5y agoI'd love to try that 127 bpp display they mention.
- gattilorenz 5y agoThere were still some users with a Voodoo 3, and some (few) poor people with a non-AMD and non-Intel x86 CPU...
- Stevvo 5y agoI have nostalgia for the games of that era far more than the hardware. While the hardware has come leaps and bounds, the gameplay has gone backwards. Take battlefield as an example; back then it was a tactical team-based shooter, today it's a gallery shooter. Same thing with the Crysis series; every entry got dumbed down.
- tikkabhuna 5y agoThe Crysis 1 -> 2 experience felt so disappointing. I loved how Crysis 1 there were no limits to the weapon attachments or switching suit functions. I remember Crysis 1 with the silenced pistols with laser pointers you would 100% hit where the laser was pointing. I'd go full cheese and sneak up to the enemy, de-cloak, 1 shot dead, re-cloak. All to push a story which started with an off screen killing of Nomad.
- automatic6131 5y agoI remember pushing the limits of "fast" gameplay with really fast suit mode switching, and before that modifying the suit values in an .ini file in the game directory to have flash-level speed and infinite energy. It's a shame that they dumbed it down in the sequels so much for the consoles. And that the game became so much worse _as a game_ (even if my first play through had my jaw hit the floor when I entered the alient ship) after the midpoint. Punching through plywood shacks for an ambush, jumping high for a grenade, using speedmode to get a flank (which the AI would be unaware of - if they couldn't see you!). Yeah it was a good time.
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe multiplayer of Crysis 1 was unique. I wish "something" happens to either bring back some people to the old one (there are ways to play it after the official servers shut down, but the community is dead), a new mod, or the multiplayer being added to the official remastered version.
- markus_zhang 5y agoYeah absolutely. The dumb down of the story almost killed me back then. I had so much hope for Crysis 2 but was disappointed that it was just an ordinary shooter with meh enemies. The tech is there but the design is way worse.
- TestSIM1 5y agoMy dad bought me HL2 back in Nov 2004. At the time my PC spec was: P4, 512 RAM, GF FX5900XT, HDD 80Gb, Dial up 56k, LCD BenQ 1280x1024, Win XP. The game was in English and I didn't speak it at all at the time so had to download the translation (700Mb audio files). Took me a couple days. With constant disconnects as dial up wasn't really reliable. Luckily, Steam allowed you to resume the download. Still using that Steam account. The game ran well. Although, my friend had Radeon 9600 Series and it performed noticeably better on his PC (or maybe I'm confusing it with a different game - Far Cry).
- culopatin 5y agoAhh I had a lowly fx5200 and dreamed of the day of being able to afford a better card. But that meant skipping 6 months of lunches and by then I’m sure the better card would not be compatible with my motherboard anymore anyway.
- Farbklex 5y agoWho were the 15 hustlers that rocked less than 24Mb ram with steam in 2004?
- TonyTrapp 5y agoProbably the same person that also had a 9-pixel wide screen with 3 bits per pixel color depth.
- NKosmatos 5y agoSteam still produces this software and hardware survey with interesting statistics: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- smcl 5y agoThe Geforce 2 MX and (to a lesser extent) Geforce 4 MX were spectacular little cards for the price when they came out, I'm not surprised they occupy first and third place in the Graphics card rankings. Also I am curious who was running Steam on a computer with <24MB of RAM in 2004, that seems ... odd.
- filmor 5y agoThe Geforce 4 MX was a rip-off, trying to extract money from people who didn't know better. It lacked shaders entirely, so it was, feature-wise, on the same level as the first GF from 1999.
- smcl 5y agoYeah, while the GF2MX was a stripped down GF2 the GF4MX was NOT a stripped down GF4, rather a slightly improved GF2MX. My feeling at the time was that the original MX was powerful enough for most and ate into sales of the higher end GF 2 GTS cards.
- low_tech_love 5y agoWow, I never realized how much the cpu clocks have stagnated in the last two decades.
- Tsiklon 5y agoWell the clock speed of a Pentium 4 from back then isn’t exactly comparable to a Core i9 from today. Heck it wasn’t comparable to AMD’s offerings at the time which IIRC were uniformly 2.5GHz
- skocznymroczny 5y agoI remember running Half Life 2 on some card way below the recommended spec. There was some commandline switch to run the game in DX7 or DX8 mode, turned everything to lowest and resolution like 640x480. Looked worse than Half Life 1, but at least was somewhat playable.
- Zardoz84 5y agoSome people managed to run Doom 3 on Voodoo 2/3 cards, applying some patches and resizing the game textures, etc... I managed to run Doom 3 on a Creative GeForce 2 MX DDR using the patches for Voodoo 2 and doing the same trick of resizing textures. The game was playable, except for the boss guarding the soul cube.
- amlib 5y agoI was one of the poor bastards playing Half-Life 2 on a Voodoo 3 around that time... stuttered like crazy, required setting everything as low as possible and then some with console commands... ran at an admirable ~20fps, but I was used to worse on my n64, so I just sucked it up lol. Looking at some screenshots, it didn't look all that bad... https://imgur.com/a/cwBHywJ https://imgur.com/a/cwBHywJ
- Svip 5y agoWhat's the difference between "Korean (Teen)" and "Korean (Adult)"? I did not realise Steam had that language distinction. Do they still have it?
- globular-toast 5y agoIs there perhaps some kind of legal thing where they turn off the red blood for the "teen" version?
- Thlom 5y agoThat's Germany I think? I seem to remember playing Carmageddon with green blood and that was some kind of German mode?
- Strom 5y agoKorea definitely has non-red blood in plenty of games. PUBG has blue blood in Korea for example. https://img.gurugamer.com//resize/640x-//2021/03/29/the-red-blood-effect-was-removed-2491.png https://img.gurugamer.com//resize/640x-//2021/03/29/the-red-... https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/7z0aot/how_to_get_blue_blood_while_keeping_your_game_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/7z0aot/how...
- nazgulsenpai 5y agoCarmageddon 64 in Germany also replaced the zombies (which were already replacements for pedestrians) with dinosaurs. Truly bizarre.
- str3wer 5y agothe difference for teens is caused by korea gaming laws, if i'm not wrong games have to limit the play time for 3 hours a day
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brainwipe 5y agoTake a moment for the 32k people using Windows Me. We will remember them.
- jim180 5y agoWhat's funny, that I had friends who were running Windows Me very successfully, without any issues whatsoever and they liked Windows Me. I guess, they were lucky in that regard. Mine experiences was totally different.
- brainwipe 5y agoI knew of one reliable Windows Me machine that needed a driver update (perhaps printer?) it became the most unstable operating system I'd ever seen. It would suddenly blue screen halfway through a Quake 2 session.
- brimble 5y agoPart of my job was tech support at the time. ME was notably worse than everything else. IIRC they also decided to screw around with placement of stuff on a bunch of settings screens for no reason, adding insult to injury.
- refracture 5y agoI think LGR did a pretty good video on this; it boiled down to what hardware you had and if there were good drivers available for it. Most hardware configurations did not and contributed to the well deserved reputation.
- ant6n 5y agoSome people don’t know you have to skip the odd ones. There’s even people who like Star Trek vii.
- culopatin 5y agoMy parents got me a brand new computer in 2001. I think it was a PIII 700mhz with 64mb of ram and onboard graphics. Day 1 windows me wouldn’t boot past a blinking cursor. I had to reset it a random number of times and it would successfully boot. Some time after through who knows what (didn’t even have an internet connection, only CDs), I figured that if I uninstalled the USB devices before shut down it would boot fine in one shot. I believe Windows Me is the reason I was way ahead in IT troubleshooting in high school and got me a position at a pretty good company which that led to my career in IT. We didn’t have money to pay a tech very often to fix our stuff so I had to bang my head through keeping that shit running so I could play Driver, CS 1.6 with bots and Test Drive 5. That computer kept running until 2008 somehow. I upped the ram to 256 by scavenging the recycling pile at work and it would do OK opening google and writing word docs
- wolpoli 5y agoThe survey looks like it picked up a couple of corrupted CPU Vendor strings like cAMD, ntel, and €. I wonder what happened?
- Nextgrid 5y agoOverclocking was pretty common (and I guess might still be in gaming communities) so I wouldn't be surprised if some machines were unstable and running with corrupted memory.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoHL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.
- globular-toast 5y agoWhen HL2 came out we were forced to install Steam whether we liked it or not. I hated it at the time because I bought the game on DVD (as was usual at the time) and just wanted to play it. I was on 56k dial-up and didn't want to be forced to download updates. I remember thinking they must have been completely crazy to do this. It was about a year before always-on broadband became widespread for everyone. Then it all made sense. It seemed to me Valve wasn't just riding the wave but actively driving it.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoRegarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though. I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start. On the other hand, we can see what the success has caused down the line. Now every publisher wants to replicate it with their own proprietary launchers, undoing all of the cleanliness and centralization that made Steam awesome in the first place. If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where. I suppose the total Steam hegemony was always going to be a temporary thing.
- goosedragons 5y agoIt was pretty terrible. I had dial up at the time and so used offline mode a lot. It was a regular thing where the game would get to 100% ready, I'd launch it online to see that it worked, switch to offline and disconnect and it no longer worked. So you'd repeat this about 6 times and maybe it would stick. There was NO avoiding being online for the first install. I had to spend 2 nights connected to dial up to get HL2:Episode 1 playable and I bought that from a DVD. I played HL2 on Xbox just to avoid Steam.
- globular-toast 5y agoThe RAM! I've had 16GiB of RAM in my PC for almost 7 years at this point. If you'd have asked me how much RAM my PC back in HL2 days had I would have said probably 4GiB, but that's unlikely given the stats here. Interestingly I haven't felt the need to upgrade from 16GiB since and that seems to be standard on "developer spec" laptops even today.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago> how much RAM my PC back in HL2 days had I would have said probably 4GiB Probably 512MB or 1024MB. It was only 3 years after release of Windows XP. Vista came out in 2007 and even then people cried about what 512MB minimal requirements is way too much.
- Semaphor 5y agoI just looked through my emails, in 2008 I bought an "Ultra DIMM 2 GB DDR2-667 Kit" :D
- globular-toast 5y agoI just looked through mine and I built a PC in 2006 with a 2GiB DDR2 kit. I later upgraded it with another of the same kit in 2008. If you go to late 2008 in the archive all of a sudden almost 40% of people are in the "2Gb[sic] and above" category.
- gruturo 5y agoUntil 64 bit CPUs and OSes became mainstream, it was not easy to use more than 4GB on a 32bit system (or even 2 in Windows XP, later raised to 3.1-3.5-ish with the /3GB switch in boot.ini). You had to use PAE (Physical Address Extensions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension ), basically a 3-level page table structure, provided the CPU and the OS offered it. It could cause a few compatibility woes with binaries not expecting it, esp. stuff running in kernel mode, and of course in the Microsoft world it was used as an excuse to charge you more - the "Standard" versions of Windows server x32 were limited to 4GB, forcing you to buy "Advanced/Enterprise/Datacenter/Whatever" SKUs. So anyway 4GB was the maximum it would make sense to install on Windows for a long time, pretty much until 64 bit CPUs and Windows 7 became common (Deliberately omitting Vista, which so many opted to skip).
- yread 5y agoI haven't realized SSE2 is so old. Almost half of the machines had it back then already.
- ho_schi 5y agoOpenGL was and is a nice thing. Linux was missing. Fixed ten years later :)
- TheRealDunkirk 5y agoReally, really disappointing to see that it's still just 1%, and Mac is only 2.5%. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- ehnto 5y agoIt's fun to think I'm some data in that survey, as it feels like a lifetime ago now. I was on team ATI and team Intel back then, now team Nvidia and AMD. Given that AMD bought ATI, I guess the only loser there was Intel.
- WithinReason 5y agoCPU frequencies didn't go up much in the last 20 years
- nickjj 5y agoI wonder how much of the 1.8% "Other" video cards is a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee. It came out at about the same time as the Voodoo 3 and was more of a budget friendly but still good card.
- stevecat 5y agoI feel like the words "3dfx Voodoo Banshee" just unlocked a part of my brain, full of IRQ conflicts and blue screens, that I had been keeping firmly closed.
- nickjj 5y agoHaha yeah. Depending on what games you were into, the term "Voodoo" in general may also unlock this part of your brain: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sHeuZ-m1tek https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sHeuZ-m1tek
- AbuAssar 5y agoAMD 46% Intel 54%
- markus_zhang 5y agoHL2 is probably one of the last generation of FPS games that are accessible to general modders. Good time.
- lynguist 5y agoI know exactly my hardware stats of that time: Prescott-256 3.06GHz (Intel Pentium 4 based Celeron D) 1 GB RAM ATI 9250 300kbit/s Internet I was sad when I realized that we had a “budget” PC that couldn’t run the latest 3D games even though it was so expensive to buy. We had bought the computer with monthly installments.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago> Prescott-256 3.06GHz (Intel Pentium 4 based Celeron D) <~Flash> how does one explain the difference between celeron and non celeron to a non tech ?? <+bomarrow1> one is for toasting bread <+bomarrow1> the other is for processing instructions http://bash.org/?769729 http://bash.org/?769729
- epolanski 5y agoFun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Basically with a solid GeForce 4 series card you could already cap the 100 fps framerate on Half-Life, but update to a much more powerful 9600 pro and framerate would start getting much more lower. The Quake 1 engine would be so old that getting better GPUs would make it run worse. Also, another fun fact about HL is that scaled massively on ram frequencies. You would get a higher boost in framerate by overclocking your ram than your cpu or gpu. It was only in late 2000s and the era of much more powerful 6th series that solid 100 fps on counter strike 1.6 were a given. I miss that era of the internet, when socializing on irc and public servers was the norm, players controlled the servers rather than companies. Today we have replaced all of this infrastructure with ease of use and queue buttons and playing online leads to barely beyond any meaningful and short lived interaction.
- jimbob45 5y agoOn that note, I still regularly get extremely bad FPS on Quake-based games today with my RX 580. Only renaming the executable seems to solve the issue. https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-atis-drivers-optimize-quake-iii/ https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-atis-drivers-optimize...
- BearOso 5y agoIt's amazing how many workarounds never get removed from big codebases. For example, look at Chrome/Chromium's about:gpu page. Some driver workarounds are still applied for bug reports that haven't been looked at for a decade.
- itsTyrion 5y agoThat sounds.. interesting? Any examples/read on that?
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago>Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Sounds more like a specific technical issue with an specific engine and drivers that lacked optimization rather than an axiom that can generalize games and GPUs for several years. If you have a source for this please share it. Also, IIRC, back then the game physics were tied to the framerate, so having too high framerate made your gameplay completely wonky as it messed up character jumps and weapon balistics, so I assume that those framerate limits with more powerful GPUs could have been there on purpose to keep the game playable.
- nixass 5y agoAhh.. The time when installing Omega Drivers and placebo effect following it were the thing.
- sylens 5y agoI think my Steam account is my oldest account that I still actively use as it has a registration date in 2003. Gmail probably the runner-up but that debuted in 2004. To that effect, my Steam username is an email address where the domain long expired and is no accessible by me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- comprev 5y agoGood memories of a time when I was into PC hardware and had a good knowledge of the product landscape. These days I have absolutely no clue as this MacBook Air (2017/i5/8/256) _just works_ :-)
- ydnaclementine 5y agoThis was back when the friends feature on steam just didn't work
- jmrm 5y agoI'm incredible surprised how "mean" my 2004 computer were. P4 at 2.66GHz, 512MB RAM, a 128MB GeForce4 MX 440, and a CRT display that runs 1024x768 at 85Hz. The amount of hours of CS 1.6 and CS:S were really big on that machine :-)