At the time, Valve was pushing the limits of older hardware, that's for sure. The engine used to run perfectly on DirectX 7 cards, which were old even then. It

At the time, Valve was pushing the limits of older hardware, that's for sure. The engine used to run perfectly on DirectX 7 cards, which were old even then. It was neat to be able to play a great-looking set of games even on older hardware and get good FPS doing so.