With all the current excitement surrounding the release of Doom III, you can bet that the folks behind Half Life 2 don't want you to forget their game as well.

Now expected some time in September of this year, Half Life 2 is just about to be shipped to Vivendi for publishing. But not before it was shown at the second annual G-Phoria awards show, held at the Shrine Auditorium in Southern California. And this time, gamers got a chance to take a shot at the controls of this new game.

Minimum system requirements appear to be a 1.2 gigahertz processor with 256 megabytes of RAM and a DirectX 7 video card. The recommended spec is 2 gigahertz or higher processor, 512 megabytes of RAM and a DirectX 9 video card.

By all accounts, ATI cards are performing best.

I'm not sure I like this current situation with videocard performance leaders: NVIDIA cards in Doom & ATI in Half-Life 2. No doubt developers will come with excuses but if you ask me I would say dollars are the reason for such a situation, where hardware manufacturers secured outstanding performance in each of the games... although eventually both companies will come with updated, optimized drivers, this is not a win-win situation for the consumer... then eventually optimizations will become visual cheats here and there, and you know the rest of the story.

Perhaps I'm being too radical about my opinions given that Doom III was just released and HL2 is still a few months away but given developers' attitude towards performance leaders (like that quote above), I'll have to be proven wrong.

very well said Julio. It's all about the $$$.

Yeah, it isn't too good for us consumers.

And even though you can trace everything back to $$$ in this case I think it has more with the way gpu's have evolved lately.

DX became the big standard that you had to follow, but then there were all these optionial parts which you could support. This meant that whilst nvidia and ati had DX9 cards, they didn't neccessarily support the same things.

Thus where you before had several different paths (due to each manufacturer needing one) you now have more and more a standard path. Only problem is that even though both major manufacturer support the standard, it's not certain that they support the standard path due to functions it's using.

This means that the cards used when developing the game will have better performance/effects than the cards that the game was only tested on at a later date.

My point being that until M$ can decide on a standard with which major parts aren't optional (PS/VS 3.0?) we'll see a divergence that is based on how the spec is interpreted and not solely on who's paying most to the developer to get extra speed...

Good!!
Even though what I've seen of pics from D3 looks good, it's HL2 I'm waiting for...

(Not too interested in horror games as I am in FPS/sci-fi games!)

Valve waited to long to release HL2. I don't think that it will compare to Doom3. They dropped the ball.

I am impressed with Doom 3 but not that impressed. It really tries to be a Resident Evil and for the most part succeeds. That being said really isn't breaking any new ground. The graphics are great of course but not earth shattering (Far Cry and Painkiller kind of stole the thunder) so really we are looking at creative content and storyline. I get the feeling that we are going to be in for quite a treat in HL2. Doom 3 is just a retread with a very thin story line.

Just my two cents.

PS. 4 player mult-play is crap! HL2 is going to support 64 players from my understanding.

Because of the time it took to release al this stuff, Doom3 and HL2 graphics don't impress me much any more. They were one year ago. Since then, it hasb ecome pretty mainstream game quality.