Thats a though one, even with intel i5 half life still lags in certain maps and FPS drops.
For original half life i guess it would be 1400MHz Pentium III with 512MB of system memory, GeForce 4/Radeon 9600.

Is that a joke? Still lags on an I5?

You ever heard of the fact that old programs that aren't compiled to take advantage of newer processors and SIMD instructions run slow still on newer processors? Same principle applies to other old OpenGL and software renderer games... Tribes 1 being a GOOD example of even if you have a massively powerful modern CPU it's still going to run slow.

I've had cases in Half-Life where my framerate just drops to below 20 and I'm on a Phenom 2 quad core at 2.60 GHz! (Depending on how the map was compiled things like this will happen quite often...)

I even heard that in Daikatana if you run it on TOO FAST a processor it takes forever to load maps for whatever reason.

Not really depending on how the map was compiled (except of course if compiled with out RAD while using a lot of lights), but more how the map was made. The main performance killer in both Half Life and CS 1.6 are server mods combined with poorly made maps. (Mapper for 10 years 😜)
Usually up to 2000 triangles of world polygon per scene (rendered) are acceptable maximum for servers with mods. Anything above will lag on an 32 player server, how much - depends on players computer system.

Daikatana loads maps slowly if the V-sync isn't forced to off. I guess John Romero's masterpiece doesn't like 60Hz monitors. 🤣

Half-Life can even hard freeze on some custom maps... Afraid of Monster's: Directors Cut does this alot.

There are also parts in that TC that slow the engine down VERY much even though it (to my knowledge) does not use any GoldSrc hacks like external opengl32.dll to do odd features like shaders and what not. Can't imagine what a Pentium II would run AoM:DC at... With just a voodoo 2 even or early AGP card.

The only way I can see Half-Life "still lags" on newer machines is the software renderer's poor handling of the expanded surfacecache at a higher res. On the other hand OpenGL and Direct3D should be 'perfect' for anything above 700MHz with a competent 3d accelerator.

Also be aware Half-Life is still very much Quake-based in terms of BSP limits (like map size, leafs, etc). The HLBSP format is literally the same, with internal RGB lightmaps and different hull sizes. All the other enhancements (radiant lighting) are engine and compiling tool based - even external WAD textures are an engine feature.

Maximum map size, with current hax some people made, is 32 000 x 32 000 x 32 000 units opposed to 8192 x 8192 x 8192 old limit.
Also leaf limit and node limit is pretty much unchanged and nothing can be done there. Entity limit is 1800 now.

Half life lags less on software mode than on OpenGL mode. Didnt test D3D much since it doesn't support some major effects like fog.
If you want to test your machine i can give you a certain map that has up to 9000 world polygon per field of view.

I believe this thread is referring to the original WON-based Half-Life, not some hacked one or some suspicious 'xash' one. Increasing map size through 'hax' also affects the network protocol and is prohibitly expensive without a total rewrite.

Half-Life's Direct3D does something its OpenGL doesn't though - overbright lighting.

Overbright lighting?

Also some modern GPU's have piss poor performance on certain OpenGL 1.x applications... you can blame the crappy driver programmers for f'ing it all up.

Its not game hax, its editor hack. Half Life originally can support 32k map size. But there do exist certain errors, but as background scenery its a-ok, its playable up to 16k.
Entity limit is 512 in old version of gold source engine.

I played through Half-Life Game of the Year Edition, Opposing Force and Blue Shift on a 1.8Ghz Win98SE system with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce MX440. They all played perfectly for me. The only oddity I noticed was that there was a missing sound effect for one of the guns, a revolver if I recall. I forget which sound it was, maybe the reload sound, but one of them was missing.

I later upgraded that same machine to 2.8Ghz and used it to play the DOS game Blood. I didn't use DOSBox because it wasn't fast enough to run Blood properly. I just played it using Windows' own DOS emulation. Most of it worked fine, but there was one alcove in one room that slowed the game to a crawl if I looked at it. There was a mirror in the alcove, but there were other mirrors in the game and none of them caused any slowdown. However, destroying the mirror got rid of the lag.

1600 x 1200 resolution, 85+ fps and Aureal surroud over headphones would be as good as it gets...

I admit, I never played HL. What video cards could you get around that time? I do know that HL2 war around the Radeon 9800 / X800 time.

Voodoo2, Voodoo Banshee, Riva TNT, S3 Savage3D, ATI Rage Pro Turbo, Matrox G200, intel i740...

leileilol wrote:

Voodoo2, Voodoo Banshee, Riva TNT, S3 Savage3D, ATI Rage Pro Turbo, Matrox G200, intel i740...

I played the Half-Life Day One demo on a Pentium 233Mhz system with a Voodoo Banshee card. It ran fine up until you started running into the soldiers, then it started dropping frames while they were darting around the room.

That's more of a CPU issue. Half-Life was a real choker.