Half-Life 2 Source DirectX 9.0 Effects Trailer

I want HL2

Wow, that's good stuff. Even if your like me and have a have a lousy connection, too slow to download the demo, you cannot miss at least the screens. This shows off Valve's expert use of DX9 technology in grand style, and gives me even greater hope, not just for this game, but, for future titles built around DX9 technology.The use of DX9, HDR-lighting is superb. Even with the relatively low-quality of the screen-shots I saw (I should be seeing soon the demo in real-time via a T7 connection on the network at college), the effect is breath taking! Combine this with the frighteningly real character effects on display in the various other demos Valve has released (my personal favorite is the Kleiner's Lab demo, where you get to see the afformentioned charecter effects up close and in great detail), and you've got the hopes and dreams of this casual gamer gone hardcore (thanks in great part to the great articles in the June issues of CGW and PC Gamer magazines), in a very well rendered, bump-mapped, anti-aliased, nutshell.Download with my full blessing (and great envy!) Enjoy!By the way, I plan on enjoying this game on an AMD-based system, on an nForce2 board with an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB. I would love to be able to justify getting a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with the less-expensive ATi card already performing perfectly in this game in DX9 "Full-Precision" mode, I just can't see my way through to spending the extra cash on a big question mark.

HOHOHO this looks amazing.. i cant wait to see how this game really is when it finally gets released.. ill wait in great anticipation.. hoho

Guys, you really dont know that much to be mouthing off about this. Look at what Valve have said. "It will run on a TNT-2." You dont need a freakin 9800 Pro OC'ed till the cows come home to enjoy the game, heck its practically wasting your money. And about Doom III, I've played the Alpha, and it worked fine on my GeForce 4 Ti4200. Yes, thats right, a 4200. Carmack has said that it will run, and will work on a GeForce 2 GTS.Quit your wigning about it being stupid because it wont run: it will. My view on buying hardware is value for money. Im not going to buy a P4 and a Radeon 9800 Pro just so that I can watch my frames go up 20%. I worked too hard for that money. Anyone that can spend this amount on a video card, must be stupidly rich, becuase I'd rather SAVE FOR A HOME!Anyways guys, try not to sound as Newbish (Not Mason and ZOD) because your just sounding like 12 year olds, when you tell us it will need graphics cards too high. For crying out loud, bump mapping was supported by DX 7 cards! And with the Doom III Engine, its designed for scaleability. If you play the game on low-end hardware, its not gonna have models with 10 Million + pollys (thats how many the base models have) its going to display a lot less. The thing is, the bump-mapping covers that up real well.Anyhoo, Cherio mates.

Razaa: That's all good that you're saving for a "home" but common... "Anyone that can spend this amount on a video card, must be stupidly rich..." ??? What kind of comment is that? The only reason nVidia has cards cheaper than ATI is because they're pushing that "frame of mind" market to people like you. It's called business and there's nothing wrong with it. Some people enjoy the best they could possibly get. And I'm NOT saying ATI is better than nVidia. I've seen nVidia outperform ATI and vice versa. It's all a matter of taste and personal preference. If it weren't... we would only have ONE video card on the market (probably owned by Microsoft hahaha). I personaly believe that the people who will enjoy the game the most are the people willing to spend the money to run the game at it's max! Only then can you truely enjoy and respect it's programmers ability to come out with a quality product. I have a 9700 Pro and I'm not stupidly rich! :) Although I wish I were... I simply budget my money well enough to afford the things I "want" without stealing from something I "need". There's also this wonderful website called pricewatch for people who are NOT stupidly rich to purchase stupidly overpriced items for a very reasonable price. So... you cannot call us stupidly rich, but you CAN call us smart shoppers. :)

Hey folks. I said all that I think has to be said about the subject; the Half-Life 2 DX9 trailer, so I think I'm going to do something totally out of charecter; respond to some other comments. I wish that more people, especially the ones with interesting, helpful or insightful things to say, would include their e-mail with their posts, that way I would not have to waste bandwidth with my response.Thanks, Razaa, for mentioning me in your post. Though I am curious, are you mentioning me as someone who you see as a newby, or an example of one who is not, LOL. I agree about your comment on not necessarily NEEDing an incredible card to run the game. Valve did say that it could run on a "PIII 733Mhz with a TNT-2 or Rage 128" (source CGW magazine). This is due to the engines incredible scalability. However, the visual quality on such a machine would be dismal. The only card to currently support DX9 "full precision" mode (that is, the maximum level of graphics available) for Half-Life 2 is a Radeon 9800 Pro series card (128MB or 256MB DDR2 or DDR as in the RadeonT 9800 XT, will do the job).Sure, you can run the game on a relatively weak system, but this is Half-Life 2 we're talkin' about! This WILL be the best game all year. I, for one, want to make it an experience worthy of the game of the year. Of course, since I am making this a priority, I do technicaly have a little more cash to put to the task.Anyway, just because your system isn't top notch, and you may not have the extra funds to make it so, doesn't mean you can't enjoy this, sure to be spectacular, game (though if you want to play it too it's fullest a top notch system doesn't hurt! Eh Brian!).Enjoy!

Hey folks. Y'know, I've been posting at MegaGames.com for a while now, and thus, I have a few posts under my belt. I would not waste time, space, or bandwitdth on what I'm about to say, except for one thing; there is currently no user profile option on MegaGames.com (too all you guys administrating this site, get with it! LOL.) Truth is, I appreciate this resource. It's cool to see so many opinions so elequently voiced (and some not so elequently, LOL), and to be able to voice my own. And something that I've mentioned before on this site that would really help out is this; please, if you find something that somebody wrote to be of particular use, send them an e-mail telling them so. It is great to be able to voice your opinion, but even greater to learn that that opinion counts, for somebody other than yourself. It's easy to do, just click on their name (If it's yellow anyway) and type in a few comments on the e-mail page that should apear with their e-mail address in the send-to portion. Of coures, the same works in the opposite. If you don't like something that I say, simply e-mail me and tell me what you think may be wrong with my head (save me hundreds in bills to a shrink!). This should prove to help encourage quality posts that mean something, and keep the big-time post-ers posting!By the way, if for some un-earthly reason, you are curious about some of my other posts (BAH!), here are the links that contain a couple of of the more intersting (yet again, BAH!) of them (you'll have to copy-'n'-paste them into your browser, assuming you beleive it's worth the effort!):[url removed] a link to my preview of Half-Life 2 at Gamers.com the official online support site of CGW magazine;: [url removed] (BAH!)

Hey folks. One of the links below, the one that SHOULD bring you to the Athlon 64 user comments page, doesn't work. Sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused (BAH! And you were SOOOO looking forward to it. LOL.).Anyway, here's one that should work (if it's of any consequence to anyone. LOL.):[url removed]

amazing but than again i think whe all need a monster of a cpu to run this whit 40+fps...

who will play it at least 2 times? geeks with radeon 9700-9800 pro... f**king bullshit!!!!!!!!!

excellent trailer, cant wait for this game

graphics look sub-par

*sighs* Another failure for mods. Great idea! Get a life and stop playing games!

your face looks sub-par idiot.

Hey, Matrix boy, here's an idea. How about you stop visiting game websites?

The machine needed to run this game at 60fps 85hz and the quality settings maxxed, will be a dual 5ghz with a graphics card that is still being developed at the moment.

we'll see what happens......

I would think d3 would need the duel 5gig's.I reckon it should run fine on todays standards in hardware.

I hate it when people like "MatrixBoxSucks" come to message boards and call everyone names, and whats the point obviously you came here to look at games, otherwise f*ck off and go play with your d*ck or something.

billybobbobjoe - A 9800 pro can do that @ 1024x768x32 at around 60-70fps.

billybobbobjoe, a 3ghz p4 cpu will be more then ample to pull those framerates, its just we need the next generation videocards.

usecommentsright - I think he was meaning everything maxed...IE a resololution of like 1600/1200 cranked not 1024, which in comparison looks horrible.

one new mirror:[url removed]

i havent seen the movie, im just writing to say why would any games company realise a game (esp one which is a sequal to an orignal classic) and make it that onlt the best pc's can run the game, this game is out there to make the company who made it money, and if only the top end pc's can run it, then there cutting off 70% of their sales coz not everyone has a top end 3d card or a great cpu, i have a 2600+ althon XP with 512mb DDR ram, and a geforce 4 TI, if it dont work on mine i will just send it back

hey paul i think it will work fine =)GEFORCE EVER!!!

yeah paul i wouldnt worry im sure vavle will do a better job with this engine (i hope)

matrixbox get a life an quit posting on forums, noone likes u anyway

so what kind of graphics do you think are not sub-par? Is there a game that is already completed (or about to be completed) which looks better than this, or even comes close?

People have to remember that there will be a thing called the "options menu" where you can set the graphics to whatever fits your machine. Stop complaining if you do not have the latest Nvidia or ATI card, just take off the FSAA and the maximum resolution/texture settings, and you will be fine! This is what great games make you do, force you to consider upgrading, even though "that spreadsheet ran so well"

Too bad the latest Nvidia card will run HL2 poorly.....

its too early to say that Geforce Fx 5900 won't work very well with HL2 because the current drivers are not optimized for it yet, by the time HL2 ships, I'm sure that they will work it out. Just like what happened with ATI cards when MGS2 Substance came out, the game barely worked at all but was unplayable untill a patch by ATI fixed the problem.

HL2 vs DOOM3 - Yeah, and while Nvidia is at it, they should fix all the other f**king DX9 games that don't run at all on their hardware. Nvidia has to do all these tweaks and get developers to make all these expensive changes to the game just to get sub-apr performance. ATi just shows up and runs all the games at the best IQ possible and gets great FPS. No tweaks just performance.

It will all work up with nvidia and ati for both games, dont swet .. and losers are thouse who think +- 10 FPS matters. Yeah and i agree with UserCommentsRight too bout ati cuz but think about it, i wouldnt mind downloading a tweak for ati which would boost the game 60%. Anyway thouse two are major games and nor ATI nor NVIDIA want to lose big time to one another.

MatriXBOX has no friends

In this day and age, video card hardware is only as good as the software that powers it. I happen to be rooting for ATI myself (used to be an avid Nvidia fan) Both companies have the hardware powerful enough to power any game, but the more complicated graphics become, the more tweaking and optimizing has to be made. This gives a lot more work for everybody, including of course the developers who have to either spend nearly twice as much time optimizing the engine for both graphics cards, or work closer with one and have the other company (Nvidia in this case) do the extra work on compliance with the new set architecture. With time all these problems will be solved, its inevitable!

your all a bunch of idiot mislead kids. you dont know wtf your talking about.a 5gig proc give me a break, to run this game. my p4 2.53@2.77 with 80 gig maxtor hdd with 133 ata, ati 9800 pro vid card and a gig of ddr 3200 ram will run this game perfect at resoluions hight than 1600x1200.you all have no clue what your talking about.

this game can run easy on anything equivlent or better than a p3 1ghz, geforce3. It just wont have the graphics cranked up all the way. Doom3 is another story though, you cant opimize it nearly as much as hl2

yah... i dont think many people will run this at max IQ....

Well, if they do and don't have the hardware and drivers needed to make it all happen, it's there own **** fault.

dont forget that the athlon 64 chips are comming out really soon and those have plenty of brute power to run hl2, or if you dont have that kind of money just buy one of the best athlons out when the 64's come out all of the current cpu's will dramatically lower prices, so upgrading shouldn't be that expensive (even if you work at mcdonalds) oh and btw the graphics looked awesome, esp if you try and look at it as if it were a real movie, when you do that it looks really real, and the tuxtures and skin of the bug looked amazing, i dont see how it is sub par, for it to be sub par there would have to be a par that it would be lower than, basically what im saying is that there are no games that look better than this nor even look close, so saying that its sub par when there currently is no par to be sub to just doesn't make any sense!!

I know that this video is a good testament that it is a good time to get a good video card that supports DirectX 9, but wait for Nvidia to come out with Detonator XP 50 drivers and read the reviews on that before making any decisions

"a 5gig proc give me a break, to run this game. my p4 2.53@2.77 with 80 gig maxtor hdd with 133 ata, ati 9800 pro vid card and a gig of ddr 3200 ram will run this game perfect at resoluions hight than 1600x1200.you all have no clue what your talking about."Nice...but honestly...i do f**king know how it feels to run a fun game on a **** comp...on my old 450...nothing or barely **** ran on it...thankfully my 3GHz with HT and 1GB ddr pc 3200 DUAL CHANNEL ram, 128 MB ATI RADeon 9800 Pro and SATA harddrives...i can enjoy it so much...so remember...even though hardcore cards are beautiful...doesnt mean u ALWAYS have to upgrade to the best every single month.

If top of the line hardware can't run the game at high resolutions and framerates, then what the F*ck can. No one will be it, if even the top computers can't run it half descent.

Maybe you guys are having trouble understanding. If you want the game to look its best, get a radeon 9800 pro, at least 512 ram, and a p4 2ghz or more. If you want the game to run decent, grab a radeon 9600 pro, a 1.3ghz chip, and 256 megs o ram. you don't need a beast to run this game! you need a beast to run this game at its absolute best

Just locking for...

i can only see gloss and bump maps on the screensshots, except for the sunbeams maybe there is nothing that was not done before?

WRONG. This and DOOM 3 are the only games that will (or should)soon come out that will use the DX 9 APIs to create bump-maps and gloss-maps in real time. In my opinion, Valve hasn't done a very good job in bump-mapping and gloss mapping many of the materials(textures) in the game. I say this because while some of the textures looked bump-mapped, most looked flat as if only a regular texture map was used. Bump-mapping and Gloss mapping, if incorporated well, should eliminate the flat textures, there shouldn't be jagged edges at the end of an object, that just ruins it. Look at Doom 3 screenshots or dl the e3 trailer, those are not movie sequences u're seeing, its all rendered real-time, and there's no flat textures, it all seems 3d, and mesh or object edged are preety much non-existent, unlike in this game where they slap u in the f**king face and remind u that Valve didn't know how to adapt a texture to a bump map and apply a gloss layer to it.

By the way upon seing the DX9 benchmarks for this game, the reqirements to play this at a devent 40 fps are insane, way too f**king high. This means BAD f**king engine. Doom 3 was meant to run on a GeForce3ti200 at a decent 30 fps. If it was ment to run well on technology that old and, imagine the image quality on todays cards. And ID still made that game look better than this on a card taht around 10x worse than what you need to run this game on high and get decent fps.

To correct Mr ZOD. ID was planing to optimize Doom 3 for the Geforce 3 Ti 200 video card while thinking that the game was going to come out about a year ago before directX 9.0 came out. By this time things changed, and Carmack decided to make his new engine the most advanced 3d engine ever, and admitting himself that you will need an insane monster of a machine to play it "the way its meant to be played"

lol, the way its menat to b played, definetly not the nVidia way.