jmke

The golden rule of Half Life 2 is this – regardless of what sort of graphics card you have (within reason), the game will run well, but at varying levels of image quality. Here’s an example: in our at_canals_08 benchmark at 1280 x 1024, the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro averages 54.2 frames per second. A GeForce4 MX440, averages 45.6 frames per second - pretty close considering the 9700 Pro was one of ATI's most powerful GPUs and sold for $400, and the GeForce4 MX is basically a GeForce2 MX. Now both of these cards were run at their maximum detail settings, but here’s where the two cards differ: the best image quality settings the GeForce4 MX can achieve are significantly lower than what the Radeon 9700 Pro can achieve. It is this type of situation that lays the foundation for our comparison here today.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2281

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jmke

While it may not look as good as the DX8 and DX9 codepaths, the DirectX 7 support in Half Life 2 is nothing short of incredible. Older card owners should upgrade their CPUs as needed but needn't upgrade their graphics cards unless they want better image quality, in terms of speed, even something as slow as a GeForce4 MX will do just fine.

interesting, but the hit in IQ is very big in my humble opinion

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