Hey, I was thinking about buying HL2 but cant decied if I wanna drop the 50 bucks on it seeing as how I have a pretty crappy video card. I downloaded the demo and everything runs pretty smoothly on medium settings with high shadows and stuff but my question is, am I missing out on the true hl2 experience by running on medium settings or is the story worth it? The graphics arnt horrible and are still waaaay better than hl. What do you guys think?

 

what card do you have?

 

oops sorry I forgot to mention I have a ti200 I think its 64mb.
2.5 with 512 and 80gigs.

 

i mean, the game really demands a good card, theres some parts that are very hard on the PC requriment wise, i mean you can always return it

 

I was gonna download the silver package from steam and just play it till I got a new vid card which is probably next time I win money at the casino. god this sucks.

 

yeah that game is taxing my 6800gt on a p4ee 3.4 machine. It runs smooth as hell, but there are times when it slows down. Doom 3 is even worse. With your card you will get some chopiness even with everything turned off.

 

I think you need to do some reconfiguration. I have an Athlon 2600+ with 1gb ram and a Geforce4 Ti4200 and I run doom3 perfectly fine. medium/high settings. Wtih that 6800gt, you should be fine.

 

What resolution and AA/AF settings are running HL2 with? You have me mildly concerned because I have an A64 3500+ and 6800GT in my very near future. Then again, I run my games at 1024.

 

i am running my games at 1024 x 768 with aa/af seetings in the middle of any game. My friend has a dual 6800 gt pci express setup and doom chops a little at times with all the settings turned way up.

 

Don't waste your money. Get the new video card first, and by the time you get finished paying for it, the price for HL2 will drop. It's on sale this week at Target for 39.99. I paid 54.99 at Best Buy three weeks ago.

 

Thanks. I was waiting for it to go on sale..

 

I run Half-Life 2 & Doom 3 at 1024x768, 4XAA/AF, max detail (not Ultra on Doom3 which is useless IMO). No slowdowns. Conssitently 50-70 fps (at least).

This is on a 3200+, 6800GT (256MB), 1G Ram.

Typically the slowdowns if that's what he's seeing is texture thrashing from not having enough memory. My friend had it bad with his 9600XT (128) and 512MB RAM. Everytime a monster would jump out, or he opened a door, he had about a ful second of chop before it calmed down.

 

i need a new vid card

 

What did he do to get the monster to calm down? Offer him a tummy rub and Shiatsu massage???

 

I have an A64 3500+ with 6800GT OC and it runs perfect. All settings are high at 1024 x 768


Edit: I'm also running on beta OS XP64 (Not sure if thats good or not though )

 

I have a 2.8 ghz P4 with HT, and 128 mb ram and 80 gigs and Intel Extreme Graphics Card (I think thats the built in one)

But Anyways What can I do so I can play Unreal Tournament at a good resolution? I know I need more RAM, what typa card is not too expensive but good?

 

I went ahead and bought it anyway. I actually just beat the game last night at 2 in the morning. The graphics were actually not bad and I would say 95% of the game ran smoothly at the 1024 resolution with decent fps. Stress test for cs source gave me ave of 76 fps on 800 resolution, I usually play at 1024 and through netgraph I get average about 30fps online play. I bought the silver package from steam so I got cs source and dod source when it comes out. It was 60 bucks but I thought I got my moneys worth. Going to vegas this weekend so hopefully I'll hit it big at a craps table and get enough money for a good vid card so I can play with all the settings on high and the hardest difficulty. But all in all not too shabby. Kinda dissapointed with the ending and whole story line. Felt weak and predictable.