Im thinking of buying HL2 but I have a few questions.
I firstly want to know how it will run on my PC. My current specs are as follows-
Athlon 1.5
256 DDR
120Gb HDD
Radeon 9500 PRO 128 DDR GFX card
My primary concern is framerates. I dont mind having to have the detial settings on low, I just want to be able to play it with as few hickups as possible. I dont mind a few framerate hits, as long as they arent big.
My second question is about Steam. Since Im on 56k, I dont want to have to download anything thats going to take awhile.
What can I expect to have to download in order to play?
Do you have to keep logging onto Steam to check for updates?
If someone who has HL2 and can enlightin me on my queries, it would be much appreciated. Im really wanting to play it!!
Took about an hour on my 56k for the whole steam process. If you can entertain yourself for an hour it's no big deal.
I've actually been playing counter strike more than hl2. I can actually play online with my modem aslong as there aren't too many people in the game.
Hopefully getting broadband soon, the prices are pretty much the same these days anyway.
Yeah, you have to keep logging on to steam to get updates. In fact, despite the play offline option, it doesn?t seem to like playing offline ? though maybe that?s just my computer? Personally I really hate the whole steam thing, and that?s put a negative outlook on the game for me.
Though in general it?s a very fun game, and the physics really create a new experience.
As far as your specs go, you should be fine in low res ? and it still looks pretty good. I ran it on a p4 2.4, 512DDR and a crappy 64meg G4 nvidia, and it ran fine mostly, though performance suffered when the system started to heat, and the system did crash a couple of times?
Though I?d like to say that looking back, I wish I bought something else (heaps of great games ATM), and waited until I got a better system to experience HL2 on for the first time. It?s just soooo much better on a fast system, and that first low res time through certainly detracted from the experience when compared to playing on a faster system.
My 2 cents, anyway.
Unsure about the computer stats - your over the minimum spec so you should be okay with low detail.
But the steam download ( configuration / sign up etc etc ) took about 20 minutes on 512 ADSL. And friends of mine have waited for over an hour ( then again it was on day 1 of launch so the server may have been labouring )