Half Life 2 Specs Revealed!

"Valve boss Gabe Newell has revealed the hardware requirements for Half-Life 2, ahead of the game's expected late summer release.

Taking time out to post on HL2Fallout's forums last week, Newell said that the minimum spec would be a 1.2GHz powered PC with 256MB RAM, Win 98/ME/2000/XP and a DirectX 7 compatible graphics card.

But for those who want to see the game running in all its glory, be prepared to spec up to around a 2.4 GHz machine, with 512MB RAM, Windows 2000/XP and a DirectX 9 capable graphics card."

I should be ready to fly.....I wish they'd hurry up and get their act together though.

Yes, I bought my nice 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 with nvidia fx thingy and 1.5GB of RAM so there is no problem playing HL2 and DOOM III.

If its gonna run in "all its glory" with 2.4 512MB RAM and DX9 card, then even my XP2000+ 512MB Ram and Radeon 9600 should be able to make it half pretty and playable at the same time!

Nice!!!!!

Yeah my machine should be ready to go but i wonder if i should go from 1GB to 1.5GB for Doom?

I'd imagine that its more your graphics card and CPU, when you have over 512MB of RAM. 1GB is pretty sweet - I think you will be cool..

Hmm, perhaps on reflection, who knows what DOOM III will need or even when the hell it will be out...

Well at least I will be ready for Half-Life 2, although I am tempted by the 6800 / X800.

Pffft... I've (and many of us) have been ready for this game for almost 2 years now.

seems to me like they were somewhat lenient with those requirements, but then again, the game was supposed to be released a year ago. So by last years standards it would have been somewhat steep for some people to see it in full glory.

Now this was good news!
It sounds as though my system is still current enough to get to see it as it should be, though I'm a bit unsure if I should try to get a faster cpu.
The 2500+ I'm on now isn't too bad, but maybe a little upgrade wouldn't be out of place.

And did, I know you said I couldn't get a faster cpu than what I have with my A7V8X, but it would seem that I can get an XP3000+. But if it's worth the cost, I'm not to sure of yet....

Or if I should stick with my plans to get an X800 instead. (The cpu won't kill my budget as the X800, but it won't give me FSAA either....)

My PC should be ready for HL2 and DoomIII. Great.

I always said from the start that most people's machines would run these games. No one listened .

Sometimes you've gotta holler around here.

Those are probably the specs to make the game creep by. I would be prepared to have a 5900Ultra an up on Nvidia, and a 9600XT and up on ATI. To make the game run super smooth.

I remember the woes of DeuXEx2 requirements.......*shutters*....

I'll say it like I said it for a year before now. The game will run decent on most hardware. What everyone fails to understand time and time and time again is that you can NOT expect to run a game in insanely high resolutions and 100% game settings and 100% settings in your Nvidia Control Panel or ATI settings. I know most people, and that is literally most people that complain, complain because they are trying to run in some insanely high resolution and then clame a game needs a super machine to run at full settings.

If you have a decent machine, and run in 1024x768 you will have a decent and appealing experience with Half Life 2 and Doom 3. I've said this from the start and I'll hold to my opinion. Most complaints come from those running in very high resolutions over 1024x768 or all settings such as AA at the max.

If you set your ATi/Nvidia settins for medium (50% or even 75%), do not turn AA all the way up, and tweak the games settings down appropriately depending on your systems spec's you will be fine.

Very very true acid.

And to be honest, look at far cry, I've seen the game running on absolute beasts of machines with all settings on max, and on my now quite humble (but loyal) machine. In screenshots if you look close you can see differences, in gameplay when i'm trying to concentrate on shooting stuff, the extra bit of AA or slightly deeper level of filtering doesn't make it any better.

It doesn't alter/enhance the gameplay experience at all in my opinion.

I'm looking forwad to both doom3 and half-life2 in 1024x768 with medium quality settings and little if any AA, and even at those settings, it'll still look amazing.

As far as the specs go as well, both games are well over due, and remember couple of years ago when doom 3 first started to emerge, it was being written with Geforce3 as its video card of choice!

And one more thing!!! I'll shut up soon honest.....

Alot of the ridiculous specs seen today on not too impressive games are down to sloppy programming where the code is not as well optimized as it could be because PC's are powerful enough nowadays anyway. One thing i could not accuse valve or id of is sloppy programming.

and thats my 2 cents

I wouldn't use the term 'sloppy programming' because that is usually what you end up with when you do try to optimize code. Writing high quality, maintainable, readable, bug free code usually involves making sacrifices in performance, but this will usually result in less strange bugs and other anomalies being accidentally included. Just something to think about ($0.02).

Let's not forget that HL2 has been delayed for nearly a year, and the spec of the average PC has increased a lot since then (Radeon 9800 Pro's are now mid-range cards). I wonder what will run faster HL2 or Doom 3? My bet is on HL2 :=).