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These 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

These 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 ago
I recall the Radeon 9800 Pro was being sold for about US$300 and came with Half-Life 2, which was designed for it. Doom 3 was out at the same time and was optimised for NVidia cards. It was a sort of "battle of the graphics platforms", both hardware-wise and software-wise. And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > came with Half-Life 2 I think mine came with Vietcong, which was... underwhelming.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Nope, I got a 9600XT, and it came with a serial number for HL2. I added a Zalman cooler on top of that card, and it was both silent and stable.
    - gattilorenz 5y ago
      I guess it depends on who made the card? Probably Sapphire and MSI and others had different bundled stuff (maybe also different by country, and I'm in EU)
    - poglet 5y ago
      I got the 9600XT for Half-Life 2 which was kinda silly in the end since HL2 took so long to come out that I could have gotten a newer card. However I believe it also came with a copy of Counter-Strike Source Beta which I enjoyed greatly. My card had tiny LED's on it that prevented me from sleeping with my computer on. Great times.
  - lovehashbrowns 5y ago
    Is that the game that had this in its soundtrack? https://youtu.be/fuYL-keoGvU https://youtu.be/fuYL-keoGvU I still listen to it on occasion. Don’t even remember how I found that song because I’ve never played that game, I don’t think.
    - gattilorenz 5y ago
      Yes, the soundtrack and setting was objectively the best part of that game
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Just shows how big the markup was, to be able to bundle a 60$ game with a 300$ card.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bayindirh 5y ago
  Don't forget that Valve later rendered HDR on ATI 9600 series card with no perceivable performance penalty, and showed that elbow grease and ingenuity can remove theoretical hardware limitations. Also, I remember that quote (from Gabe himself, I think): "We may have polished graphics further, but that game won't be Half Life anymore.", a direct stab taken at linearity of Doom of that time.
  - qwery 5y ago
    > elbow grease and ingenuity can remove theoretical hardware limitations Of course, 'theoretical' hardware limitations aren't hard limits -- they're soft[ware] ones. However, if you find yourself battling concrete hardware limitations, what you need is to put your back into it and a little know-how.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      The thing is, HDR is considered too expensive and impossible on these cards without specific hardware capabilities and relevant API support. Valve said "Ha, let's see!" and implemented great HDR visuals with integers only. So it's not just let's hack together and see how it goes. IIRC, it took three re-implementations to get it right and performant. Similarly, I'm not a stranger when it comes to hardware and its limits, but what deemed impossible by many, even knowledgeable people, doesn't mean it's a hard, cold truth (e.g. demoscene and PoC||GTFO).
      - qwery 5y ago
        My apologies, I read too deeply into your comment. I just enjoyed (too much) the use of the phrase 'theoretical hardware limitations'.
        bayindirh 5y ago
        No worries, enjoy your stay. :)
- filmor 5y ago
  The Radeon cards came with coupons for HL2 a while before the game was released. My brother bought one from someone in school, there was quite a bit of trading going on :)
  - Daneel_ 5y ago
    I still have mine - it came with my 9800 XT. The last AGP card I ever owned.
TestSIM1 5y ago
>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. If I remember correctly you needed Shader model 3.0 support to get those fancy graphical effects which required GeForce FX series & 6th Series (6600/6800 etc).
filmor 5y ago
The GeForce 4 MX (first in the list) was a rebranded GeForce 2, so just T&L and no shaders. The "real" GeForce 4 (second in the list) supported shaders just fine, as did the GeForce 3, so it got the pretty water.
- goosedragons 5y ago
  Kid me got burned so hard by this. Upgraded my GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce 4 MX. It was slightly better and had I think 4 times the VRAM but I learned to pay a lot more attention after that.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  And yet, my box with a 50eur GeForce4 MX440 with 64mb VRAM ran Half-Life 2 on launch. AMD Duron 1800+ and 256mb of 333MHz DDR and the damn thing ran HL2! A machine with a 50eur CPU and 50eur GPU ran it! They must have optimized it well. And that machine is included in that 2004 Steam hardware survey. :)
  - ridgered4 5y ago
    There was a very different attitude to budget offerings from nvidia back then, and despite a lot of complaints about them I'm not sure the new way is better. Nvidia seemed to like to take their old hardware design and crank it up a bit, slap a new version on it and sell it as a budget offering. No new features, but it did a respectable job of playing older games which is what I think most people want out of a cheapo card. Later offerings usually featured super cut down cards that had more of the new features but not really enough power to actually turn them on and get playable framerates. And that is how things have sort of gone since then. Like you said, the GF4 MX440 was actually a decent performing card. Sure, you were stuck with DX7 rendering path but it did a good job with it.
  - anthk 5y ago
    AMD Athlon XP, 256 MB DDR2, GF2 MX 200/400. HL2 ran. Crazy. It was crazy.
- anthk 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FieryTransition 5y ago
So today you would do it all in a programmable shader pipeline, create and update vertices according to some displacement from a 2d water simulation or just noise, and color the appropriately in another pass with the correct texture etc. As far as I know with my limited understanding from writing a few shaders. But what did you do back then? I was pretty young, but I'm not even sure you had such a clean programmable separation in the render pipeline? :-)
- monocasa 5y ago
  For the geometry you'd do basically the same thing but on the CPU and just update a vertex buffer every frame. You'd probably do some cute register combiner trick for the texturing. You can kinda think of register combiner stages as pixel shader instructions. And in hardware of the time they're the same thing. On GeForce 3, loading a pixel shader is just blitting the register combiner hardware config registers all at once. GeForce 2 could have had a shader model version 0.5 or something with only four instructions if they wanted to expose it in the API like that.
anthk 5y ago
Was it an MX series? They sucked.

samplatt 5y ago

I 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 ago
  Nope, 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    I 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.
- lovehashbrowns 5y ago
  Is that the game that had this in its soundtrack? https://youtu.be/fuYL-keoGvU https://youtu.be/fuYL-keoGvU I still listen to it on occasion. Don’t even remember how I found that song because I’ve never played that game, I don’t think.
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    Yes, the soundtrack and setting was objectively the best part of that game
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Just shows how big the markup was, to be able to bundle a 60$ game with a 300$ card.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bayindirh 5y ago
Don't forget that Valve later rendered HDR on ATI 9600 series card with no perceivable performance penalty, and showed that elbow grease and ingenuity can remove theoretical hardware limitations. Also, I remember that quote (from Gabe himself, I think): "We may have polished graphics further, but that game won't be Half Life anymore.", a direct stab taken at linearity of Doom of that time.
- qwery 5y ago
  > elbow grease and ingenuity can remove theoretical hardware limitations Of course, 'theoretical' hardware limitations aren't hard limits -- they're soft[ware] ones. However, if you find yourself battling concrete hardware limitations, what you need is to put your back into it and a little know-how.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    The thing is, HDR is considered too expensive and impossible on these cards without specific hardware capabilities and relevant API support. Valve said "Ha, let's see!" and implemented great HDR visuals with integers only. So it's not just let's hack together and see how it goes. IIRC, it took three re-implementations to get it right and performant. Similarly, I'm not a stranger when it comes to hardware and its limits, but what deemed impossible by many, even knowledgeable people, doesn't mean it's a hard, cold truth (e.g. demoscene and PoC||GTFO).
    - qwery 5y ago
      My apologies, I read too deeply into your comment. I just enjoyed (too much) the use of the phrase 'theoretical hardware limitations'.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        No worries, enjoy your stay. :)
filmor 5y ago
The Radeon cards came with coupons for HL2 a while before the game was released. My brother bought one from someone in school, there was quite a bit of trading going on :)
- Daneel_ 5y ago
  I still have mine - it came with my 9800 XT. The last AGP card I ever owned.

TestSIM1 5y ago

>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. If I remember correctly you needed Shader model 3.0 support to get those fancy graphical effects which required GeForce FX series & 6th Series (6600/6800 etc).

filmor 5y ago

The GeForce 4 MX (first in the list) was a rebranded GeForce 2, so just T&L and no shaders. The "real" GeForce 4 (second in the list) supported shaders just fine, as did the GeForce 3, so it got the pretty water.

goosedragons 5y ago
Kid me got burned so hard by this. Upgraded my GeForce 2 MX to a GeForce 4 MX. It was slightly better and had I think 4 times the VRAM but I learned to pay a lot more attention after that.
RF_Savage 5y ago
And yet, my box with a 50eur GeForce4 MX440 with 64mb VRAM ran Half-Life 2 on launch. AMD Duron 1800+ and 256mb of 333MHz DDR and the damn thing ran HL2! A machine with a 50eur CPU and 50eur GPU ran it! They must have optimized it well. And that machine is included in that 2004 Steam hardware survey. :)
- ridgered4 5y ago
  There was a very different attitude to budget offerings from nvidia back then, and despite a lot of complaints about them I'm not sure the new way is better. Nvidia seemed to like to take their old hardware design and crank it up a bit, slap a new version on it and sell it as a budget offering. No new features, but it did a respectable job of playing older games which is what I think most people want out of a cheapo card. Later offerings usually featured super cut down cards that had more of the new features but not really enough power to actually turn them on and get playable framerates. And that is how things have sort of gone since then. Like you said, the GF4 MX440 was actually a decent performing card. Sure, you were stuck with DX7 rendering path but it did a good job with it.
- anthk 5y ago
  AMD Athlon XP, 256 MB DDR2, GF2 MX 200/400. HL2 ran. Crazy. It was crazy.
anthk 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

FieryTransition 5y ago

So today you would do it all in a programmable shader pipeline, create and update vertices according to some displacement from a 2d water simulation or just noise, and color the appropriately in another pass with the correct texture etc. As far as I know with my limited understanding from writing a few shaders. But what did you do back then? I was pretty young, but I'm not even sure you had such a clean programmable separation in the render pipeline? :-)

monocasa 5y ago
For the geometry you'd do basically the same thing but on the CPU and just update a vertex buffer every frame. You'd probably do some cute register combiner trick for the texturing. You can kinda think of register combiner stages as pixel shader instructions. And in hardware of the time they're the same thing. On GeForce 3, loading a pixel shader is just blitting the register combiner hardware config registers all at once. GeForce 2 could have had a shader model version 0.5 or something with only four instructions if they wanted to expose it in the API like that.

anthk 5y ago

Was it an MX series? They sucked.