Conclusion

What could be better than one of the most incredible games we’ve ever played in its full glory at 1600x1200? How about running that game on your aging Athlon XP machine – a system that you were positive you’d have to upgrade after trying to play Doom 3 at those same levels of detail? Yes, Half-Life 2 runs incredibly well on older systems and even better on new ones.

There are areas that employ much more demanding shader detail, so expect graphics hardware to play a more significant role in the game than these tests suggest. For example, the canal level, where you pilot the jet-ski-like boat, relies heavily on water. That water shader will have a significant impact on performance, making it particularly important that you use the best video card available to you.

If you find yourself in a situation where your processor is older than any of those tested, it’s a great time to think about upgrading, especially if Half-Life 2 is a priority. NVIDIA’s nForce4 chipset is slowly materializing with support for PCI Express and some advanced storage options. Moreover, high-end PCI Express graphics cards, though still rare, will be rolling out prior to the end of 2004. And best of all, there are some remarkably inexpensive processors available, thanks in part to AMD’s transition to 90nm manufacturing. You can pick up a Socket 939 Athlon 64 3200+, a great performer in our tests, for less than $200. The 3.2GHz Pentium 4 is priced similarly, though it doesn’t benchmark quite as well.

But to revisit the question posed at the beginning of our story, does Half-Life 2 more closely resemble the scoring of Valve’s Video Stress Test or Counter-Strike: Source? Not to cop out here, but it actually looks like a balance between both. There are clearly processor-limited environments in the game, as demonstrated by our benchmarking here. And even at resolutions up to 1600x1200, there remains variance between different platforms. However, there are also much more graphically intensive scenes that tax video hardware.

If you’d be interested in looking at scaling characteristics for more graphically intensive levels, let us know. In the meantime, check out Brandon’s high-end graphics performance analysis for a better idea of how the latest 3D architectures handle Half-Life 2. Also keep an eye out for his mainstream graphics piece, which will tie all of these scaling stories together nicely.