When I was still wearing the goat (not the animal, huh), I was told regularly that I had an air of Gordon Freeman. Impossible ! The guy is much more valiant than me, and I am much more beautiful kid than him.
But truce of Blabla, you who complain that Cyberpunk 2077 does not turn properly on your RTX 3060, let me tell you how this youtuber managed to run Half-Life 2 on the graphic equivalent of a scientific calculator…
Turning Half Life 2 to 60 FPS with no more than 8 MB of VRAM, it is impossible normally then to understand the magnitude of the challenge, let’s dive into the bowels of the legendary 3D Phantom XP 2800. This graphics card, designed by Pine Technology (which will later become XFX), was marketed in 2005 as an affordable game card. In reality, it was the graphic equivalent of a silicon scam, a bit as if you were sold for a Ferrari which hides under its hood the engine of these lawn mowers that Volkswagen sells.
The 3D Phantom would shamelessly recycle a chipset located at 305 dating from 2000 (already rotten at the time) with completely ridiculous specs: 8 MB of SDRAM (not even DDR!), Directx 6 compatibility (when DirectX 9 was already the standard), a consumption of 3W (your smartphone consumes more in standby mode), and a manufacturing process in 250nm which The age when dinosaurs coded in Basic.
This graphics card had less power than a tamagotchi under crack. At the time, it was sold as “able to run games”, while she was already struggling to display the Windows XP wallpaper properly without stuttering.
So when our intrepid youtuber “Official Budget-Builds”Launched Half-Life 2 on this relic, the result was not surprisingly cataclysmic. With the minimum settings in 640 × 480, the game turned to 10-15 FPS on average, painfully reaching 30 FPS in the darkest and empty hidden hidden hids.
As a reminder, Half-Life 2 recommended a DirectX 7 compatible card when it was released with at least 64 MB of VRAM. So we are 8 times below From the minimum union, with a card that does not even meet the requirements of DirectX.
And the worst was not this fluidity worthy of the PowerPoint slideshow of your accountant. No, the biggest problem was stability because yes, the game systematically crashed every 5 minutes.
The cause? A complete saturation of the VRAM, which overflowed faster than a blocked sink!
Faced with this technical disaster, the Youtuber started a quest that even the developers of Valve would never have imagined to know how to optimize Half-Life 2 to turn with this config. The optimization process required hours of hacking in the game configuration files (an ancestral art practiced by the PC players of the 2000s of which I am part and today almost forgotten in the age of automatic optimizations).
The ultimate sacrifice being to force the game to start in 320 × 240 pixels & mldr; It is a resolution that even Nokia telephones in Clapet would find insulting.
Finally, to complete this table of desolation, the game is forced to use exclusively DirectX 6, while it was designed to shine En DirectX 9.
But after this graphic massacre worthy of a horror film, the miracle finally occurred: the game stopped crashing and began to turn with relatively acceptable fluidity, oscillating between 25 and 60 fps depending on the areas.
It’s playable! Youpi!
But at what price?
Gordon Freeman now looks like a character of Minecraft who would have melted in the microwave. The textures have practically disappeared, replaced by primary colors worthy of a daltonism test. Water, formerly technical flagship of the Source Engine, now looks like “A brown soup with floating blue squares”, In the very words of the Youtuber.
The walls are reduced to colorful Wireframes, barely recognizable enemies, and the physics of the game (yet revolutionary at the time) seems to work by magic since we no longer even distinguish the objects that are manipulated. Basically, it is Half-Life 2 seen by someone who would have forgotten his glasses and taken LSD.
But hey, after all these adventures, the game runs perfectly, even if it must be recognized, it is unrecognizable.
In any case, this portage marks a real contrast with the version Half-Life 2 RTX During remastering:
A real major technological gap that will appeal to fans of the first hour!
Anyway, the loop is complete, and this absurd experience will remind you of the blessed era when the optimization of the games was an art of survival and not a luxury.
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