How to make Half Life 2 perform with cheap kit

THE BIGGEST gaming event of the year is only two weeks away and many people are fretting. Half-Life 2 promises to be as good as the original, at least if the many early reviews are to be trusted, and just about everyone wants to play it. But what if you're stuck with old hardware and not a lot of money?

A few months ago Valve made Counter Strike: Source available. It uses the Half-Life 2 engine, Source, and it looks fabulous. More importantly for people waiting to play Half-Life 2, it includes something called the Video Stress Test. It's designed to give you an idea of how well the game will perform on your system. Go to any hardware site and you can find out exactly how well an Athlon 64 FX or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition will play the game. What they don't tell you is how well your existing system will fare.

The question is what to do if you're stuck with an old 2GHz Pentium 4 or an Athlon 1800+ with a GeForce MX in it. You want to play the game at its best but can't afford a new system for just one game. So, after a week of scrounging old bits of kit, getting hold of the Half-Life 2 Video Stress Test and ripping machines apart, the INQ has the answers that you need.

Specifications
The first interesting bit of news came from Valve itself quite a while ago. The minimum system that you need is as follows:

• 1.2GHz Processor
  
• 256MB RAM
  
• DirectX 7 graphics card
  
• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

It seems an unbelievably low level of requirements so it was put to the test. No processor type specified? Celeron it is then. That might seem an almost evil choice but it seemed only fair at the time. The recommended specs appear much more likely:

• 2.4 GHz Processor
  
• 512MB RAM
  
• DirectX 9 level graphics card
  
• Windows 2000/XP

Testing, Testing
So, with one beaten up old Celeron 1.2GHz ready to roll, it was given a slight edge in the form of 512MB of PC100 RAM. That's about the cheapest upgrade there is. On the graphics front, more evil was perpetrated. The machine had come with a GeForce 4 MX420. You don't get much more DirectX 7 than that so it stayed in the machine for the first round. It was followed by a GeForce 4 Ti4200 and then an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro. All of the settings were the program's recommended ones for the card except with the 9800 where switching on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering made no difference to the performance. Just for good measure, an old Athlon 1800+ machine was dug out too. The results were surprising:

	Celeron 1.2 GF4 MX420	Celeron 1.2 GF4 TI4200	Celeron 1.2 ATI 9800 Pro	AMD 1800+ ATI 9800 Pro
Resolution	800x600	800x600	1024x768	1024x768
Model Detail	Medium	Medium	High	High
Anti-aliasing	None	None	4x	4x
Texture quality	Medium	Medium	High	High
Filtering	Bilinear	Trilinear	4x Aniso	4x Aniso
Water style	Simple	Simple	Reflect all	Reflect all
Shader level	High	High	High	High
Shadow quality	Low	High	High	High
Wait V.Sync	Disabled	DIsabled	Enabled	Enabled
3D Mark 2001SE	1910	3880	5577	10715
Stress Test Results (FPS)	29.67	24.54	20.83	52.03

You might find the idea of the MX420 beating the Ti4200 and the 9800 Pro on the Celeron, shall we say, unexpected. If you had watched it happen, you'd have understood instantly. The amount of extra code being run to generate a DirectX8 or 9 image is substantial. This becomes truly apparent when you see the difference in image quality:

Graphics
DirectX7 does such a poor job that you might as well forget it. There are no transparencies so the water looks like mud and the beautiful effects of the refracting glass is gone to be replaced by solid blocks. If you were hoping that your old GeForce MX was somehow going to be up to the job, you're out of luck.

DirectX8 does a whole lot better but, in comparison with DirectX9, it too loses out badly. Although the transparencies are there, the refractions are gone and the water is barely visible. It doesn't look so terrible in the screenshot above but the moment that you see it in motion you'll know that it's nothing close.

Which leaves DirectX9. It really is the only worthwhile option for playing Half-Life 2 and brings the story of what you need to…

Upgrade 1: Graphics
The first item on the shopping list, if you don't already have one, is a DirectX9 graphics card. Unfortunately, that's not quite as clear cut as it could be. The nVidia fanboys won't be happy but the GeForce FX5xxx series doesn't count. Valve has worked hard on getting those cards to work but it can only get them to do a sort of DirectX8 and a bit. One of the new GeForce 6600 cards from around $135 will do a fine job.

ATi fares much better. A Radeon 9600 Pro should make things workable though probably not ideal. Forget anything with SE in the name and anything below the 9600. The good news is that a bit of searching around can turn up some interesting stuff. If you hunt well, you should be able to turn up a 9800 Pro for around $160. That's cheaper than many 9600XT cards. It's almost certainly the way to go if you can afford it.

The pick for budget DirectX9 Graphics card has to be the ATi 9800 Pro. It's quite a lot faster than the nVidia 6600 for not much more money. The one other option is to pick up an old ATi 9700 from a bargain bucket or second hand, it will run at about the same speed as the 6600.

So that you have an idea why you'll want a full DirectX9 card, take a look at the following screenshot. If you look carefully, you'll see the reflections of the panels in the water. It's far more apparent when you see the Video Stress Test in motion. Notice that the card has enough power for the anti-aliasing to be on so there are no jagged edges. This is how the game is supposed to look.

Frame Rates
Realistically to play Half-Life 2 single player you want at least 25 frames per second and hopefully more like 50. On older games it was possible to get much higher frame rates by allowing the graphics card to not wait for the vertical sync and start drawing the next frame before the monitor finished the one it was on. It led to horrible looking tearing but was essential if you wanted to get high frame rates in the hope of beating your online opponents. One thing that cropped up in the tests was that wait for vertical sync was off by default in the Video Stress Test but switching it on never made more than 1 frame per second difference with any of the cards. Assuming that you want the game to look good, it's worth setting it to enabled.

A quick glance back up to the results table for the various machines above shows how much difference a faster processor makes. The Celeron tries hard but doesn't quite make it. The Video Stress Test is run without any of the Half-Life 2 AI, physics or gameplay elements so the figures in the table are only showing part of the equation. A better guess would be that you should expect about half those numbers at many points in the game. That's nothing to do with the graphics card and everything to do with processor power.

Upgrade 2: Processor
The results table and Valve's recommended spec should give you a good idea of what you need processor wise. A Celeron 1.2GHz is unlikely to make you a happy gamer but the AMD 1800+ looks as though it might pass the grade.

Based on the figures available, if you've got a Pentium 4 2.0GHz or an Athlon XP2000+ along with an ATi 9800 Pro and 512MB of RAM, you're sorted. You're not going to get quite as smooth a game as someone with a 2.4/2400+ but you'll do OK. The 1800+ did fairly well in the Video Stress Test but you probably don't want to go much below that for a truly playable game.

A Whole System
What's just as interesting is if you want to build a whole new machine to play Half-Life 2. It appears quite feasible to put together a system using the cheapest processors available. A Celeron 320D (2.4GHz) or Sempron 2400+ system won't set you back much and will play the game pretty well. The only expensive component is the graphics card.

A quick charge around US and UK sites produced figures of around $575 and £425 (inc. VAT) for a build-it-yourself machine with one of the above processors, an 80GB drive, a DVD writer and Windows XP Home, though not including a monitor. That's without hunting for the cheapest possible parts. Shopping around a few of the more obvious system builders produced similar prices if you don't fancy building a machine yourself.

Conclusion
Everyone was horrified when Valve pushed the release of Half-Life 2 back for a year but it might just have turned out to be a huge favour for those without deep pockets. The fact that an extremely modest system should run the game quite happily is perhaps not quite so good for the industry. Where Doom III had every gamer desperately trying to scrabble together the money for an Athlon 64 FX with a GeForce 6800GT, Half-Life 2 will quite probably run on the average gamer's existing setup. There's no huge pressure to upgrade unless you're a long way out of date.

The 16th of November 2004 is only two weeks away from the time this article was written and that's when Half-Life 2 hits the streets. If you were living in fear of your system not making the grade, now you know whether it will or not and what to do about it. µ

L'INQs
Some heavier weight graphics cards tested with an Athlon 64 FX over at Anandtech
The problems with the GeForce FX5xxx series discussed at FiringSquad