Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 2 - Mainstream DX8/DX9 Battle

A Pretty Decent DirectX 7

The second most popular Half Life 2 GPU according to Valve’s own statistics is the GeForce4 MX.  As a quick refreshed, the GeForce4 MX is basically a GeForce2 MX with an updated memory controller, so its feature set will not be DirectX 8 compliant like the GeForce4, rather it is more of a DX7 part.  So what do you lose if you’ve got an older card like a GeForce2, GeForce4 MX or original Radeon?

Of course the water quality in DX7 mode is similar to what we saw in DX8 mode, but there are much larger sacrifices made in DX7 mode. 

For starters, features like bump mapping are gone, making the levels look significantly worse than when using the DX8 path.  The screenshot below shows Valve’s DX8 path at work, mouse over to see what you lose by going to DX7:

Hold mouse over image to see DX7 mode

While you could argue that there’s not too big of a difference between DX9 and DX8 (other than the water), everything looks significantly worse in DX7 mode. 

The other big change is that in DX7 mode the draw distances are significantly reduced, so what you notice are that certain objects will slowly fade in the closer you get to them.  For example, staring into the distance we see nothing in front of the chain link fence:

Stepping forward we begin to see something faint fade in:

Moving in a little closer we see the green dumpster completely:

Another few steps and we see two more objects faintly appear:

A little further and we see two trashcans appear as well:

Running in DX7 mode does sacrifice quite a bit, but the game is extremely playable as you are about to see.  If you have the ability to run in a higher quality mode then you definitely should, but what’s most important is that even in DX7 mode Half Life 2 looks better than any other DX7 title.  At the same time Half Life 2 in DX7 mode runs and looks better than newer games on graphics hardware that’s now four years old.  You can download all of the screenshots on this page in an uncompressed format here.

Let’s see how well the GeForce4 MX runs in DirectX 7 mode…