True, but a 1.2 GHz Athlon (2000) with a Radeon 9800 (modern) makes a great gaming PC while a P4 3.2C (modern) and a GeForce 2 GTS (2000) do not. That's all I meant really; any modern CPU will make a good gaming box, but you have to be very selective about the graphics card.phongn wrote: No, you can't do that with an old GPU, but an old CPU will hurt, too. You'll run into CPU-limitations as it struggles to send enough setup over the AGP bus.
Those "minimum" requirements were set by the publishers, not the developers. Carmack had flat out told his fans that if they use the NV10 codepath in Doom III, it will look like shit. He meant for this game to use DX8+ shaders. HL2 we don't know as much about but from the look of it, the same is true. They need to sell these games after all and if they are only compatible with programmable shader cards they lose a lot of their audience.The D3 engine is targetted at the GeForce GTS or R7000 level for minimum specifications, plus 256MB RAM and a 1GHz processor. The R2x0 and NV3x series cards are quite in excess of that minimum. The D3 OpenGL renderer is little more advanced that what's seen in DirectX 7, but it uses those features in quite sophisticated ways.
The HL2 engine is targetted at the TNT2 level with a 733MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM. The HL2 DirectX renderer is very advanced but is designed to scale down as far as DirectX 6 in terms of feature-set.
Obviously, neither game will look extraordinary nor will framerates be stellar. That's not the point: the game should run at an acceptable speed even with such old hardware.
Btw, it isn't true to say that they are "targeted" at hardware that low. They are designed so that they CAN run on that kind of hardware, but it isn't the way the game was designed to run.