Items tagged with Half Life 2
Today is the big day; Half-Life: Alyx has been released. We had no idea that Valve was even working on the game until late last year, and once it was announced, the gamers around the globe lost their collective minds. Rather than being a traditional first-person shooter that is controlled using a mouse and keyboard like Half-Life and Half-Life 2 that came before it, Half-Life: Alyx leaps into the realm of virtual reality (VR). Hardware Requirements Being a VR-only game, the hardware requirements (to run the game as the devs intended it) are steep for this latest installment in the franchise, which arrives nearly 16 years after Half-Life 2 was released to the public. For starters,...
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Half-Life: Alyx is one of the most highly anticipated PC games for the H1 2020, and with good reason. Although it isn't the mythical Half-Life 3, it's the next besting thing, serving as a prequel of sorts to the groundbreaking shooter Half-Life 2. All of the excitement surrounding the latest entry in the Half-Life saga coupled with the fact that it’s a virtual reality-only title has led to a huge uptick in interest for the requisite hardware needed to run the game. According to tracking firm SuperData, sales of Valve's Index VR headset more than doubled from Q3 2019 to Q4 2019, climbing from 46,000 units to 103,000 units. Sales might have also been spurred by the fact that each Index...
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"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.” Yes, something truly terrible has happened; famed Valve veteran Marc Laidlaw has left Valve after an incredible 18 years with the company. If Laidlaw’s name isn’t instantly familiar to you, we’re sure you’ve heard of the games that he has been involved in during his illustrious career at Valve -- his mark on the gaming industry has been profound. Laidlaw served as the “sole writer” of both Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and as the “lead writer” for the follow-up Half-Life episodes. Given Laidlaw’s undeniable importance to the Half-Life...
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A pair of classic game titles developed by Valve have now been ported over to NVIDIA's recently launched Tegra K1-powered SHIELD tablet. The classic games include Portal and Half-Life 2, though these aren't straight (or lazy) ports -- both feature a wide variety of high-end and exclusive visual effects built to showcase the 192-core Tegra K1 chip in NVIDIA's SHIELD. According to a blog post on NVIDIA, these exclusive effects -- render-to-texture shadows, bump mapping, specular highlights, motion blur, and higher quality texture filtering -- make Portal and Half-Life 2 just as visually appealing as the full PC editions. In addition, Valve optimized both titles to utilize the SHIELD tablet's optional...
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Over the last few years, Valve's Steam service has become the go-to location for digital gaming. This transition has generally been viewed positively by PC gamers—mainstream gaming retailers, while scarcely thrilled, have devoted less and less space to PC titles as time has gone on. This positive trend is being bucked in the UK, where angry retailers are calling Steam an unfair, monopolistic service. "If we have a digital service, then I don’t want to start selling a rival in-store,” the digital boss at one of the biggest UK games retailers told mcvuk.com. "Publishers are creating a monster – we are telling suppliers to stop using Steam in their games." Part of this hostility...
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It's nothing new to see AMD and NVIDIA arguing over benchmarks, but news that came across our desk today put a new twist on a very old battle. A few days ago, NVIDIA contacted us and inquired if we'd be interested in testing HAWX 2's stand-alone benchmark for evaluation, noting that tessellation effects were employed for better terrain realism. We said sure—a number of DX11-enabled games and/or test programs make use of the effect currently. Synthetic benchmarks aren't much better at this point; Unigine might as well be called TesselationMark. NVIDIA's Reviewer's Guide also put great emphasis on the game's use of tessellation and Fermi's superior performance in that area. We read...
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Heya folks! Well it's the start of a new week, and for those of you who are HL2 fans, Valve has mentioned there will be a surprise for the community released this week. CS:S updates? Team-Fortress 2? Releasing the shackles of Steam? Who knows, but I'm personally hoping it's something along the lines of an actual Multiplayer for HL2... CS:S is good and all, but I want to get some frags by shooting people in the face with a radiator using the gravity gun ;) Half Life 2 and CPU scaling @ amdzone "We are eager to test a wide range of MHz with game, and we decided to outfit our nForce 4 Ultra demo board with the fastest components for playing possible. That would be the Athlon 64 FX55, the ATI...
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I'm back! That's right folks, my faithful internet has been down since Sunday, and because of that I had to sit and stare at my HL2 CD's as they collected dust. Oh well, at least this time wasn't as bad as when my internet was slower than Dial-Up for two months. Before I play HL2 though, I'm here to bring you fine people the news, so let's get started... ABIT AA8 and AG8 - Intel Socket 775 in Style @ TweakTown "It is ABIT's turn in the spotlight today as we provide a look into two of their newest motherboards, the AA8 and AG8. Each are designed specifically to work with Intel's new Socket 775 processors along with DDR (on the AG8) and DDR-2 memory (on the AA8). After taking a look at both...
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